Name Maralyn Polak Role Columnist | Books The writer as celebrity | |
Occupation Columnist, author, screenwriter, poet, editor, researcher | ||
Residence United States of America | ||
Maralyn Lois Polak is an American columnist, screenwriter, performance poet, spoken word artist, novelist and journalist.
In collaboration with architect Benjamin Nia, Polak co-created the 25-minute documentary My Hometown: Preservation or Development? about the threatened demolition of 19th century buildings near Philadelphia's historic Rittenhouse Square, and preservationists' efforts to save them from a developer's wrecking ball.
She also authored the experimental online meta-novel, IMAGINARY PLAYMATES/Man in Her Mind: Further Adventures of Boris and Natasha, serialized weekly for six months on the former political-literary website FemmeSoul.Com, and a cartoon book, Anoushka on Her Deathbed: 101 Cartoons From the Abyss.
As a former commentary columnist for the online news site WorldNetDaily during a decade as one of their few progressive contributors, Polak wrote more than five hundred political satire opinion pieces in her sometimes controversial weekly column called Left-Handed.
Her journalistic career also includes a long stint with the mainstream media as nationally syndicated weekly celebrity interview columnist for Knight-Ridder and the now-defunct Sunday Magazine of The Philadelphia Inquirer, where she did over a thousand columns.
Polak's quirky reviews, essays and opinion editorials have appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Reader's Digest, Andy Warhol's Interview, the San Jose Mercury News, The Philadelphia Inquirer and The New York Times.
Of that dichotomous era, Polak recalls, "Before I became interested in filmmaking, I led two parallel lives: journalist and poet. The journalists thought I was a lunatic and the poets thought I was a sell-out. Both sides got it wrong. Now my ambition is to simply be one real person. Easier said than done."