Read a poem slowly. Let the words sink in. Then photograph what you feel.
This is what Morrigan and her colleague Kerri McDonald invited photographers to do in the summer of 2017 for a series of visual essays inspired by poetry. They called the series, America Today, In Vision and Verse.
Morrigan and Kerri selected poems by six contemporary American poets — Ada Limón, Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello, Adrian Matejka, Jericho Brown, Katy Lederer and Jenny Johnson — and presented each one to a different photographer.
The photographers included: Todd Heisler (who made the image above), Preston Gannaway, Zora Murff, Nina Robinson, Carolyn Van Houten and Damon Winter.
The series ran online and in three consecutive Sunday papers. Readers wrote in to the Times calling the series “brilliant” and “an incredible joy” and the print presentation won two Society of News Design awards.
It ran in three consecutive papers as well as online, for which Morrigan and Kerry received the 2019 Pictures of the Year International Online Daily Life, Visual Editing Award of Excellence.
The poets that Morrigan and Kerri selected included Nickole Brown, Jennifer Chang, Tonya Ingram, Layli Long Soldier, Melissa Studdard and Joy Harjo who was appointed the new United States poet laureate in June 2019. She is the first Native American Poet Laureate in the history of the role.
Photographers included: Nydia Blas, Annie Flanagan, Ruth Fremson, Cig Harvey, Maddie McGarvey, Anjali Pinto and Erika Rodriguez
This time the online experience was enhanced by recordings of the poets reading their own work, allowing the viewer to cycle through the images at the same time as they listened to the poems.