Posts Tagged ‘writer’
Evan Hunter/Ed McBain, “there is no frame in writing.”
Among the very rare group of writers whose books have sold over 100 million copies, the inventor of the police procedural with his dozens of 87th Precinct novels, the author of The Blackboard Jungle, and the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds,” Evan Hunter as the boy Salvatore Lombino was art editor of his school…
Read MoreAmiri Baraka: “Politics is to protect truth and beauty”
“Politics is to protect truth and beauty.” Amiri Baraka, famed leader of the Black Arts Movement, was a poet, playwright, jazz critic, and actor. He was also a notorious political revolutionary who did not cease protesting despite arrests and beatings by the Newark police and struggling to install an honest government that would respond to…
Read MoreSusan Minot Paints Everything, Everywhere
“I like to say ‘I write,’ or ‘I paint,’ and not ‘I am an anything.” The award-winning writer of novels, short stories, screenplays, and poems, Susan Minot says she grew up in a family in which everyone always had something before them to do with their hands. It is a habit that has stayed with…
Read MoreLawrence Ferlinghetti is turning 100!
Legendary poet, artist, publisher and social activist Lawrence Ferlinghetti will celebrate his 100th birthday on March 24. My on-camera interview with him in 2001 has been edited into a four minute homage by Michelle Memran, producer and director of last year’s critically lauded film “The Rest I Make Up.” After producing no fewer than 30…
Read MoreCharlie Brown and Spider-Man inspired Clifford Thompson
Writer-Artist 14: Clifford Thompson “Being at odds with the world around you is a common theme among personal essayists, and my first model of an artistic treatment of such themes was Peanuts.” Writing and Art Were a Single Pursuit Even as a child of seven or eight, Thompson says his attempts at writing and art…
Read More“Eating with my Eyes”: The Landscapes of Guy de Maupassant
Writer-Artist 13: Guy de Maupassant “I have the clear and profound feeling of eating with my eyes, and digesting colors as you would digest meat and fruit.” Achieved Greatness and Wished for More France’s greatest short story writer—his first collection of short stories was in its twelfth printing in less than two years, and his…
Read MorePoly-poly-math: Lera Auerbach is a Quadruple Threat
Writer-Artist 12: Lera Auerbach “Borderless creativity” A Living Renaissance Woman Lera Auerbach has resisted creative pigeonholing from her earliest years. Playing the piano and composing at four, she was told she must choose, that it was not possible to become both a virtuoso performer and serious composer. When, at 12, she informed her piano instructor that…
Read MoreProlific Poet William Jay Smith Somehow Found Time to Paint
Writer-Artist 10: William Jay Smith 97 years old when he died, William Jay Smith apparently wasted not a minute of them. U.S. Poet Laureate Achieving national publication of a poem at 14, it was probably unsurprising that Smith would end up Poet Laureate of the United States, a member of the American Academy of Arts…
Read MoreThe Drawings of Nobel Prize Winning Author Joseph Brodsky
Writer-Artist Eight: Joseph Brodsky “There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.” The greatest Russian poet of his generation, Nobel Prize-winner, Poet Laureate of the United States, and member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Joseph Brodsky illustrated many of his writings. Drawings and Writing Although he…
Read MoreThe Stunning Visual Art of Author Annie Weatherwax
Writer-Artist Six: Annie Weatherwax Annie Weatherwax, novelist, short story writer, essayist, and visual artist was the 2009 winner of the Robert Olen Butler Prize for Fiction for her story “The Possibility of Things.” Her novel, All We Had, was turned into a movie directed by Katie Holmes. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The…
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