"Throughout her childhood, Safiya Sinclair's father, a volatile reggae musician and militant adherent to a strict sect of Rastafari, became obsessed with her purity, in particular, with the threat of what Rastas call Babylon, the immoral and corrupting influences of the Western world outside their home. He worried that womanhood would make Safiya and her sisters morally weak and impure, and believed a woman's highest virtue was her obedience. In an...

"Poet Laureate Joy Harjo offers a vivid, lyrical, and inspiring call for love and justice in this contemplation of her trailblazing life. In the second memoir from the first Native American to serve as US poet laureate, Joy Harjo invites us to travel along the heartaches, losses, and humble realizations of her "poet-warrior" road. A musical, kaleidoscopic meditation, Poet Warrior reveals how Harjo came to write poetry of compassion and healing, poetry...

"Life, like a poem, is a series of choices." In her memoir You Could Make This Place Beautiful, poet Maggie Smith explores the disintegration of her marriage and her renewed commitment to herself in lyrical vignettes that shine, hard and clear as jewels. The book begins with one woman's personal, particular heartbreak, but its circles widen into a reckoning with contemporary womanhood, traditional gender roles, and the power dynamics that persist...

Presents a unique literary biography, tracing Whitman's childhood, various careers, and the evolution of the masterpiece that proved his lifelong work, Leaves of Grass. A collage of photos, paintings, and manuscripts accompanies excerpts of letters from Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson, as well as readings from sections of Leaves of Grass.

Poems on love and the family. In The Planned Child, she writes: "I hated the fact that they planned me ... made a chart of the month and put / her temperature on it, rising and falling, / to know the day to make me -- I would have / liked to have been conceived in heat, / in haste, by mistake, in love, in sex, / not on cardboard, the little x on the / rising line that did not fall again."

Blending daguerreotypes, paintings, manuscripts, excerpts from Dickinson's letters, and readings from nearly a dozen of her poems, this program presents the biography of one of America's most unique and influential voices in poetry.

An inspiring memoir of a Pulitzer Prize winner's triumph over disability Despite being a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2008, Philip Schultz could never shake the feeling of being exiled to the “dummy class” in school, where he was largely ignored by his teachers and peers and not expected to succeed. Not until many years later, when his oldest son was diagnosed with dyslexia, did Schultz realize that he suffered from the same condition....

"A sweeping and stunning novel what happened to the poet Elizabeth Bishop during three life-changing weeks she spent in Paris amidst the imminent threat of World War II. June 1937. Elizabeth Bishop, still only a young woman and not yet one of the most influential poets of the twentieth century, arrives in Paris with her college roommate. They are in search of an escape, and inspiration, far from the protective world of Vassar College where they are...