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James Franco & Frank Bidart at Bowery Poetry

A private reading by James Franco and Frank Bidart of their new work, to benefit Bowery Arts + Science.

JAMES FRANCO (born April 19, 1978) is an American actor, director, screenwriter, producer, teacher, author and poet. His first prominent role was a lead part, "Daniel Desario", on the short-lived cult hit television program Freaks and Geeks, he later achieved recognition for playing the title character in the TV biographical film James Dean (2001), in which he won a Golden Globe Award, and for playing Harry Osborn in Sam Raimi's Spider-Man trilogy (20022007). He is also known for his roles in the films Pineapple Express (2008), Milk (2008), 127 Hours (2010), Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011), Oz the Great and Powerful (2013), Spring Breakers (2013), and This Is the End (2013). He also had a recurring role in the ABC soap opera General Hospital. For his role in 127 Hours, Franco was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor.

Franco volunteers for the Art of Elysium charity and has taught a class at New York University in feature filmmaking and production. In 2013, he began teaching a course in short film production at the University of Southern California and a course in screenwriting at his alma mater, University of California, Los Angeles. He is a PhD candidate at Yale University.

FRANK BIDART was born in Bakersfield, California on May 27, 1939 and educated at the University of California at Riverside and at Harvard University, where he was a student and friend of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop.

His first volume of poetry, Golden State (G. Braziller, 1973), was selected by poet Richard Howard for the Braziller Poetry series, but it wasn't until the publication of The Sacrifice (Random House, 1983) that Bidart's poetry began to attract a wider readership. Bidart's early books are collected in In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965-90 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990).

His recent volumes include Metaphysical Dog: Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013); Watching the Spring Festival: Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008); Star Dust (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005); Music Like Dirt (Sarabande Books, 2002); and Desire (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997), which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critic's Circle Award. He is also the co-editor of Robert Lowell's Collected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003).