NH poet produces films on American saints

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Two video poems produced by New Hampshire poet Mary Ann Sullivan about American Saints, “Saint Katharine Drexel” and “Saint Damien of Molokai,” have been chosen to compete in the Shorts Category for the 2013 World Interfaith Harmony Film Festival in Los Angeles.

The annual event is observed during the first week of February in conjunction with the United Nations World Interfaith Harmony Week.

The two films represent a new genre of poetry.

Inspired by filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, the digital video poems explore shots as moving hieroglyphs and ideograms.

Digital poets often combine animated hieroglyphs with words to craft their poems, returning to an ancient form of writing: pictographs. But, unlike early Chinese, Egyptian and Greek hieroglyphs, these poetic symbols move.

Sullivan has been crafting animated digital and video poems for more than a decade.

Her first animated poems, “Shaking the Spiders Out,” was published by the British Broadcast Corporation online.

Her video poem collaboration with Russell Goings and The Manhattan Country School, “The Children of Children Keep Coming,” premiered in 2011 at the West Chester Poetry Conference, the largest poetry conference in the United States.

Sullivan, a long-standing member of the Catholic Press Association and member of the American Academy of Poets, is associate professor at Hesser College in Manchester.

Her first novel, “Child of War,” set in Belfast, Northern Ireland, was named a Notable Book in Social Studies by the National Council of Social Studies and Children’s Book Council.

She is the editor of The Tower Journal, an international literary journal.