Haydn Reiss (producer/director) has been making independent films for twenty years that often focus on writers and poets. As a producer for hire his clients include organizations working on the front lines of education, the environment, culture, human rights, politics and health. In 1998, Reiss directed the award-winning Rumi: Poet of the Heart, which was seen on over 100 PBS stations and screened in festivals around the world.
Participants:
Coleman Barks is a renowned poet and the bestselling author of The Essential Rumi, The Soul of Rumi, Rumi: The Book of Love, and The Drowned Book. He was prominently featured in Bill Moyers' PBS poetry series, "The Language of Life" and in “Rumi: Poet of the Heart,” directed by Haydn Reiss. He taught English and poetry at the University of Georgia for thirty years, and he now focuses on writing, readings, and performances. Barks' work has contributed to a strong following of Rumi in the English-speaking world. Due to his work, the ideas of Sufism have crossed many cultural boundaries over the past few decades. Coleman Barks received an honorary doctorate from Tehran University in 2006.
Robert Bly is an American poet and author of the best-selling prose work on modern masculinity, Iron John (1990). His strong poems and charismatic personality made him one of the most prominent poets of the post-World War era, and in the 1960s he made headlines as an outspoken opponent of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. After three decades as a celebrated poet and translator, Bly was credited with starting a "men's movement" in the U.S. after the publication of Iron John, a treatise urging men to reconnect emotionally with mythical and traditional masculine archetypes. His poetry has won many awards, including the 1968 National Book Award (The Light Around the Body), and he's translated the works of such poets as Kabir (India), Hafez (Iran), Pablo Neruda (Chile) and Rainer Maria Rilke (Austria-Hungary).
John Gorka learned how to play the banjo when he was ten years old. It was while he was in college, however, that he became acquainted with writing and performing contemporary folk songs. Soon he was opening for the singer/songwriters that would pass through Bethlehem, PA, on tour. Since winning the Kerrville New Folk competition in 1984, John Gorka has gone on to become one of the most prominent contemporary singer/songwriters of his generation. In 1991, Rolling Stone magazine called him "the preeminent male singer-songwriter of what's been dubbed the New Folk Movement."
Maxine Hong Kingston is an outspoken contemporary feminist writers, and states in her autobiographical book The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1976), "The swordswoman and I are not so dissimilar . . . What we have in common are the words at our backs. The idioms for revenge are 'report a crime' and 'report to five families.' The reporting is the vengeance—not the beheading, not the gutting, but the words." With prose that both unsettles Chinese American sexism and American racism, Kingston is a "word warrior" who battles social and racial injustice. Among many awards Kingston has received are a National Humanities Medal in 1997 and a National Book Award medal in 2008 for "Distinguished Contribution to American Letters". She is the editor of “Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace”
Michael Meade is a master storyteller and scholar of mythology. He is the founder of the Mosaic Multicultural Foundation, which is currently focused on youth at risk, "genius based" mentoring, and developing the "arts of community" in diverse organizations and groups. For over seven years, Michael has worked bringing the arts of poetry and myth to gang youth, college students, artists, and into prisons and other settings. He is the author of Men and the Water of Life, and co-editor with Robert Bly and James Hillman of The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart. Meade’s newest book is The World Behind the World, which shows how "myth makes meaning" and helps the reader find a meaningful path through life.
W.S. Merwin is a poet, translator, and environmental activist, and has become one of the most widely read poets in America. Merwin went to Europe as a young man and developed a love of languages that led to work as a literary translator. W.S. Merwin’s recent poetry is perhaps his most personal, arising from his deeply held beliefs. He is not only profoundly anti-imperialist, pacifist, and environmentalist, but also possessed by an intimate feeling for landscape and language and the ways in which land and language interflow. In the fall of 2004, Merwin received the 2004 Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award. Included in his numerous awards are the Pulitzer Prize (twice), the National Book Award, the Tanning Prize, the Bollingen Prize, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.
Naomi Shihab Nye has spent 35 years traveling the country and the world to lead writing workshops and inspiring students of all ages. Nye was born to a Palestinian father and an American mother and grew up in St. Louis, Jerusalem, and San Antonio. Drawing on her Palestinian-American heritage, the cultural diversity of her home in Texas, and her experiences traveling around the world, Nye uses her writing to attest to our shared humanity. She has been featured on two PBS poetry specials: “The Language of Life with Bill Moyers” and “The United States of Poetry” and also appeared on NOW with Bill Moyers. She has been visiting writer for full semesters for The Michener Center at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Hawaii’s.
Kim Stafford is the author of a dozen books of poetry and prose, and was director of the Northwest Writing Institute and the William Stafford Center at Lewis & Clark College, where he began teaching in1979. He holds a Ph.D. in medieval literature from the University of Oregon, and has worked as a printer, photographer, oral historian, editor, and visiting writer at a host of colleges and schools. His book, Having Everything Right, won a citation for excellence from the Western States Book Awards in 1986. Stafford has received creative writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Governor's Arts Award for his contributions to Oregon's literary culture, and his work has been featured on National Public Radio.
Alice Walker is a novelist, short-story writer, poet, essayist, and activist. Her most famous novel, The Color Purple, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1983. Walker's creative vision is rooted in the economic hardship, racial terror, and folk wisdom of African American life and culture, particularly in the rural South. Her writing explores multidimensional kinships among women and embraces the redemptive power of social and political revolution. In March of 2003 she joined with Maxine Hong Kingston and CodePink to protest the United States military action in Iraq and was arrested for demonstrating in a closed area in front of the White House and crossing police lines.
