Cultural Daily

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One amazing poet made a film of another remarkable poet reading her poem.

Jamaal May is an award winning poet originally from Detroit. His first book, Hum, received the Beatrice Hawley Award from Alice James Books and an NAACP Image Award nomination. Other honors include the Spirit of Detroit Award, an Indiana ReviewPoetry Prize and fellowships from Cave Canem, Frost Place, Bucknell University, and Kenyon College. Recent poetry can be found in The Believer, The New Republic, Poetry, Poetry Daily, Best American Poetry 2014, and the anthology Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poems for the Next Generation
(Viking/Penguin, 2015). Recent prose appears online from Poets and Writers Magazine as well as Poetry. From Detroit he serves as Co-Poetry Editor for Solstice, teaches in the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA program.

But in this video, he is the man behind the camera, the filmmaker. The performer is Tarfia Faizullah, his co-director at the Organic Weapon Arts Chapbook and Video Series.

Tarfia Faizullah is the author of Seam (Southern Illinois University Press, 2014), winner of the 2012 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry’s First Book Award. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares,The Missouri Review, Passages North, New Ohio Review, Crab Orchard Review, The Southern Review, Mead, Poetry Daily, Mid-American Review, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of an AWP Intro Journals Award, a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize, the 2012 Copper Nickel Poetry Contest, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Margaret Bridgman Scholarship in Poetry, a scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, a Fulbright fellowship, and other honors.

Enjoy this haunting poem and film.