screenplays
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The Poetry Center presents Darius James and Val Jeanty in a first-ever collaboratiive "workshop performance" at The Poetry Center, in advance of their full performance the following night at The Lab in San Francisco. James reads from a newly issued edition of his novel Negrophobia: An Urban Parable (NYRB, 2019). Jeanty plays an electronic Korg Wavedrum as well as electronic turntables, improvising in real time with James's reading. This event, the first of a three-evening program in The Poetry Center's In Common Writers Series, was supported by a grant from the Walter & Elise Haas Fund.
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The Poetry Center presents novelist Ernest J. Gaines, reading from an early typescript of his subsequent novel In My Father's House, and talking extensively with the audience: on his first publication, as a San Francisco State student, in the premier issue of student-produced Transfer magazine, on his process of writing his celebrated novels grounded in black family and cultural history, and on the adaptation of his fiction to film, for The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pitman, starring Cicely Tyson (the nine times Emmy Award production was first broadcast to television earlier that year, in January, 1974). Gaines is introduced for this video by Phyllis Cummings of the Black Student Union.
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The Poetry Center presents Joan Didion, in what was her first ever public reading. Celebrated prose-stylist, journalist, novelist, and screenwriter, Didion reads the full part One, comprised of eleven chapters, of her new novel, A Book of Common Prayer (Simon & Schuster, 1977). She follows her reading by opening the floor to questions, and entertains a series of queries from her audience related to her writing variously of fiction, nonfiction, and (working in collaboration with her husband, John Gregory Dunne) for the screen. Didion is introduced by Poetry Center director Lewis MacAdams.