Poet and writer Kwame Dawes travels to Jamaica to explore the experience of people living with HIV/AIDS and to examine the ways in which the disease has shaped their lives. The journey brings him in touch with people who tell their stories, share their lives and teach him about resilience, hope and possibility in the face of despair.
HOPE featured on Nieman Storyboard
Published April 23, 2010
Jacqueline Marino
Nieman Storyboard
Writing is part of the digital story: examples of powerful multimedia presentations that incorporate (not just link to) good nonfiction writing.
[Earlier this week, Jacqueline Marino wrote about the many words that often accompany multimedia stories on Interactive Narratives, a showcase of such work sponsored by the Online News Association. Today, she provides some examples of presentations that integrate writing into the storytelling.]
Annesha's daughter prays in front of the Altar in the backyard (Joshua Cogan 2008)
1. Hope: Living and Loving with HIV in Jamaica
Even though The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting sent poet Kwame Dawes to Jamaica to write an article on HIV/AIDS for The Virginia Quarterly Review, Dawes's poems became the blueprint for the work of photojournalist Joshua Cogan, who retraced Dawes's footsteps, gathering visual stories for the incredibly moving multimedia presentation. "We used the poems because the poems also handed to the photographers and designers an emotional and visual series of ideas and images that they could vamp on and expand on in their work," Dawes explains.
One stop was "Hope's Hospice," about which Dawes writes:
These days, the language of death
is a dialect of betrayals; the bodies
broken, placid as saints, hobble
along the tiled corridors, from room
to room. Below the dormitories
is a white squat bungalow, a chapel
from which the handclaps and choruses
rise and reach us like the scent
of a more innocent time.
The people Dawes interviewed are inspirations for his poems, and readers can meet them through photographs and videos on the site. Dawes uses the first person, develops his characters and plunges his reader into the emotional lives of his subjects. He includes the symbolic details of everyday life, as well as various points of view of his subjects.
Stephen Sapienza crafts simple but compelling narratives, chronicling the lives and plights of everyday people, from the cities of Bangladesh to the streets of Sierra Leone, writes Ameto Akpe.
Pulitzer Center grantee Kwame Dawes reflects on his work in the Caribbean and his journey as a poet and documentarian.
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