Add to ORKGIn this audiovisual recording from Saturday, March 24, 1995, as part of the 26th Annual UND Writers Conference: “States of the Art,” Gordon Henry and Yusef Komunyakaa participate in the noon panel. The panelists discuss how they came to be writers, how they enter traditions of storytelling, how stories of others are collected in poems and fiction, the appropriation of stories, the writing process, the influence they find in other writers, the overlap between fiction and reality, exploring how real people become fictional characters, and how good writing serves as a reflection of reality. Komunyakaa reads “Venus\u27-flytraps” to demonstrate how his personal history manifests into language. Henry and Komunyakaa close with a discussion of the ...