Literary Arts
Celebrating National Poetry Month 2018
To celebrate National Poetry Month 2018 and O, Miami 2018, Inspicio has mashed together video recorded readings by notable poets Campbell McGrath, Marie Howe, Richard Blanco, Denise Duhamel, and Mark Doty. For more information about O, Miami and National Poetry Month activities, check out the following websites: O, Miami Poetry Festival The Betsy Hotel The videos below are organized by poet and run between 44 seconds and 4 minutes. Tap on any video. You must be connected to the Internet to view the videos. CAMPBELL MCGRATH: 4:08...
read moreMorton Dean: A Noble Career in Broadcast Journalism
Introduction to Morton Dean. 2:23 min. Painting: Raymond Elman. Pictured Above Is At Least One Person Who Loves the Boston Red Sox and Edward Hopper’s House. 60 x 40 inches. Oil & digital collage on canvas. Morton Dean (b.1935) is an award-winning American television and radio news anchor, broadcast news correspondent, documentary film director, and author. Dean is a former weekend news anchor for CBS Evening News, as well as ABC’s Good Morning America. While a correspondent for CBS News for 20 years and...
read moreA Video Chat with Pulitzer Prize-Recipient Jane Smiley
Introduction to Jane Smiley. 3:00 min. Photo & Design: Raymond Elman. Video Montage: Jade Cheek. Music: Hard Times Come Again No More · Stephen Collins Foster · Alisa Jones Wildwood Flower. Jane Smiley (b.1949) was born in Los Angeles, California, and grew up in Webster Groves, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis. She obtained a BA in literature at Vassar College, then earned an MA, MFA, and PhD from the University of Iowa. While working toward her doctorate, she also spent a year studying in Iceland as a...
read moreThe Remarkable Jonathan Plutzik
Introduction to Jonathan Plutzik. 5:53 min. Drone video: Zachary Plutzik. Music: The (New) Beethoven Quartets. The 32 Piano Sonatas Reimagined. By Jeffery Briggs. Piano Sonata in C-minor, op. 13. Performed by the Amernet String Quartet. Photo & Design: Raymond Elman. How does the son of a poet become the owner of the most culturally advanced hotel in the world? Practice, practice, practice. (The hyperbole is mine until proven otherwise.) And with a “little” help from his family and friends — for the...
read moreThe Classic That Changed Christmas
The Man Who Invented Christmas trailer. 2:40 min. Editor’s Note: Mitchell Kaplan, the founder of both Books & Books and the Miami Book Fair, joined forces with award-winning Hollywood producer Paula Mazur to create The Mazur/Kaplan Company, with the objective of identifying, optioning, and producing literary properties for film and TV. The Man Who Invented Christmas is their first film to be distributed nationwide, beginning November 22, 2017. The film is based on the book The Man Who Invented Christmas: How...
read moreInto the Deep with Author Patricia Posner
Introduction to Patricia Posner: 1:58 min. Photo & Design: Raymond Elman. Music: Orlando Jacinto Garcia, Music for Berlin. Patricia Posner was born in London and spent half of her life in the U.K. and half in the U.S.A. For thirty years Posner worked on 12 books of investigative historical nonfiction with her husband, bestselling author Gerald Posner. On those projects, she conducted every interview with him, sifted through thousands of pages of original documents in government and private archives, and worked on...
read moreA Video Chat with Author Jay McInerney – Capturing the Zeitgeist
Introduction to Jay McInerney 2:14 min. Photo and design by Raymond Elman. Music: Carmen Cicero Jay McInerney Jr. (b. 1955) is a New York Times Best Selling American novelist. His novels include Bright Lights, Big City; Ransom; Story of My Life; Brightness Falls; The Last of the Savages; Model Behavior; The Good Life; and Bright, Precious Days. He edited The Penguin Book of New American Voices, wrote the screenplay for the 1988 film adaptation of Bright Lights, Big City, and co-wrote the screenplay for the television film...
read moreDanielle Flood: The Unquiet Daughter
Introduction to Danielle Flood. 3:23 min. Photo & Design by Raymond Elman. Danielle Flood’s true story, The Unquiet Daughter, could be called the sequel to Graham Greene’s classic novel The Quiet American, which has been taught on college campuses all over the world for decades. “Passionate and unflinchingly honest, The Unquiet Daughter is a fascinating memoir that explores the tangled connections between Graham Greene’s fictional version of wartime Indochina and the real people there whose...
read moreKingfolk
Excerpt from Kingfolk, a novel. This excerpt takes place midway through Kingfolk, a historical novel. Kingfolk is set in 1874 in a fictional town of ex-slaves in Southern Louisiana during the Reconstruction Era. The novel follows Beah, a freedwoman traveling to the town of Banias, Louisiana in hopes of finding her mother; Prophet Moon, an itinerant vision-seer who offers to help Beah with her goal; and the founder of the town, Claude Banias, who struggles to protect Banias from bloodthirsty radicals. The three lives...
read moreFive More Poets
Poetry from Miami reflects the diversity of the city itself. We don’t just mean writers’ nations of origin, ethnicity, and subculture. There is no single style one could identify as a Miami school of poetry. There are no factions either. One dip of the stick into the poetic wetlands and up comes narrative drama, fragmentation, spoken word, formalism, and more. Such factions and schools are foolish anyway. Miami is an organic case in point. — Annik Adey-Babinski — Michael Martin Inspicio Poetry Editors Caroline...
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