Doc Film, Fellowships and Finishing These Books

I know it's been a long time since I posted here: nearly six years in fact. In that time, I've been honored to finish my first documentary film, The Changing Same, which airs on PBS and streams at American Documentary, and have received fellowships from the Ebedi, Ragdale, and Civitella Ranieri foundations and the Florida Education Fund!

While illness prevented me from traveling to Nigeria to teach Baldwin's and Shakespeare's plays while completing my own, I did travel to the Chicago suburbs in 2019 and completed a draft of my next poetry collection, which is in its final edits and under consideration with a press. I hope to have good news in 2023 and 2024, when I also aim to return to Italy for my Civitella Ranieri residency and work on poems and my memoir about the two decades I spent in some of the nation's largest newsrooms.

The good news about the pandemic that has upended nearly three years of most of our lives is that it brought me home to Marianna, Florida, the inspiration for almost every piece of art I inhabit.

While awaiting my latest collected works' publication, check out newish poems, essays, journalism, conversations, and lectures— & congrats to this crop of Civitella Ranieri Fellows!