Non-fiction
Aptowicz has published non-fiction essays and articles in such publications as Bust magazine, About.com's Poetry Channel and the spoken word anthology Word Warriors.
In 2008, Soft Skull Press published Aptowicz's Words In Your Face: A Guided Tour Through Twenty Years of the New York City Poetry Slam. U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins wrote that the book "leaves no doubt that the slam poetry scene has achieved legitimacy and taken its rightful place on the map of contemporary literature" and the Washington Post named it one of five Notable Books on Exploring Poetry in 2008. Aptowicz spent 4 years writing the book, which "explores the birth, growing pains and continuing development of the Poetry Slam." The book features interviews with Saul Williams, Maggie Estep, Bob Holman and Slamnation director Paul Devlin, among others.
Aptowicz also penned the non-fiction screenplay, Mütter, a screenplay based on the life of Mütter Museum founder Thomas Dent Mütter. The screenplay would go on to win the 2003 "Set In Philadelphia" Screenwriting Award at the Philadelphia Film Festival and a Sloan Foundation Fellowship at the 2004 Hampton International Film Festival. In 2005, she was invited to attend the 2005 Sloan Film Summit in support of the screenplay, and was commissioned to write an article about her experiences at the Summit by New York City's Museum of the Moving Image. As of 2008, the screenplay remains unproduced, although a short based on the feature-length script was created as a part of the Philadelphia Film Festival prize package.
In 2010, Aptowicz was named the 2010-2011 University of Pennsylvania ArtsEdge Writer-in-Residence. She will be using the residency to work on "a non-fiction book about the life and times of Thomas Dent Mutter." The Mütter Museum has granted Aptowicz full access to their museum, library and archives for the duration of the residency so that she may conduct her research for the book, and the Mütter Museum's Francis C. Wood Institute for the History of Medicine has additionally awarded Aptowicz with a Wood Institute Travel Grant to help further fund and support her work on this project.
In April 2013, it was announced that Aptowicz's biography of Mütter, titled Curiosity, will be published in Fall 2014 by the Gotham Books division of Penguin.
Read more about this topic: Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz