Andrea Gibson, a celebrated poet and performance artist who through their verse explored gender identity, politics and their four-year battle with terminal ovarian cancer, has died aged 49.

Gibson’s death was announced on social media by their wife, Megan Falley.

Gibson and Falley are the main subjects of the documentary Come See Me in the Good Light, which won the Festival Favorite award at the Sundance film festival and is scheduled to air on Apple TV+ later this year.

“Andrea Gibson died in their home (in Boulder, Colorado) surrounded by their wife, Meg, four ex-girlfriends, their mother and father, dozens of friends, and their three beloved dogs,” Monday’s announcement reads.

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The film, which explores the couple’s enduring love as Gibson battles cancer, is directed by Ryan White and includes an original song written by Gibson, Sara Bareilles and Brandi Carlile. During a screening at Sundance in January that left much of the audience in tears, Gibson said they didn’t expect to live long enough to see the documentary.

Tributes poured in Monday from friends, fans and fellow poets who said Gibson’s words had changed their lives, including writers Cheryl Strayed and Elizabeth Gilbert. Many LGBTQ+ fans said Gibson’s poetry helped them learn to love themselves. People with cancer and other terminal illnesses said Gibson made them less afraid of death by reminding them that we never really leave the ones we love.

In a poem Gibson wrote shortly before they died, titled Love Letter from the Afterlife, they wrote: “Dying is the opposite of leaving. When I left my body, I did not go away. That portal of light was not a portal to elsewhere, but a portal to here. I am more here than I ever was before.”

Linda Williams Stay was “awestruck” when her son, Aiden, took her to hear Gibson perform at a bar in San Francisco a decade ago. Their poetry was electrifying, lighting up the room with laughter, tears and love. Gibson’s poetry became a shared interest for the mother and son, and eventually helped Stay better understand her son when he came out as transgender.

“My son this morning, when he called, we just sobbed together,” Stay said. “He says, ‘Mom, Andrea saved my life.’”

Gibson’s poetry later helped Stay cope with a cancer diagnosis of her own, which brought her son back home to St George, Utah, to help take care of her. They were delighted when Gibson accepted their invitation to perform at an event celebrating the LGBTQ+ community in southern Utah.

“It was truly life-changing for our community down there, and even for our allies,” Stay said. “I hope that they got a glimpse of the magnitude of their impact for queer kids in small communities that they gave so much hope to.”

Gibson was born in Maine and moved to Colorado in the late 1990s, where they had served for the past two years as the state’s poet laureate. Their books included You Better Be Lightning, Take Me With You and Lord of the Butterflies.

Colorado governor Jared Polis said on Monday that Gibson was “truly one of a kind” and had “a unique ability to connect with the vast and diverse poetry lovers of Colorado”.

The comedian Tig Notaro, an executive producer on the documentary and Gibson’s friend of 25 years, shared on Instagram how the two came up together as performers in Colorado. Hearing Gibson perform for the first time was like witnessing the “pure essence of an old-school genuine rock star”, and their words have guided Notaro through life ever since, she said.

“The final past few days of Andrea’s life were so painful to witness, but simultaneously one of the most beautiful experiences of all of our lives,” Notaro said. “Surrounded by real human connection unfolding in the most unlikely ways during one of the most devastating losses has given me a gift that I will never be able to put into meaningful words.”

Gibson’s illness inspired many poems about mortality, depression, life and what happens next. In the 2021 poem How the Worst Day of My Life Became My Best, Gibson declared: “When I realized the storm / was inevitable, I made it / my medicine.” Two years later, they wondered: “Will the afterlife be harder if I remember / the people I love, or forget them?

“Either way, please let me remember.”

Salman Rushdie will be the subject of a new documentary on his life and attempted assassination in 2022.

Alex Gibney, the documentarian behind such films The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief and Taxi to the Dark Side, will direct Knife, inspired by Rushdie’s memoir of the same name which was published in April.

Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder recounts the Indian-born, British American novelist’s life and career, as well as the onstage stabbing in August 2022 that left him temporarily on a ventilator. The 76-year-old writer was speaking at an event in Chautauqua, New York, when a 24-year-old man from New Jersey rushed the stage and attacked him with a knife, stabbing him 15 times in the head, neck and chest. Rushdie lost vision in one eye and use of one hand as a result of the attack.

The film, first reported by Variety, will explore Rushdie’s recovery “in the broadest sense” using never-before-seen personal footage shot by his wife Rachel Eliza Griffiths, according to a press release. The film will cover both Rushdie’s physical and spiritual healing, from a book that was “necessary” him to write – “a way to take charge of what happened, and to answer violence with art”, he said.

The book delayed the trial of Rushdie’s alleged attacker, Hadi Matar, who pleaded not guilty to attempted murder and has been held without bail since the attack.

Knife will draw from Griffiths’s footage – the couple had been married just 11 months before the attack – as well as interviews and excerpts from Rushdie’s work, including the fatwa calling for his death issued by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989 for his book The Satanic Verses.

“It’s a delight and an honor to make this film about Salman Rushdie, an extraordinary novelist, a funny, poignant and resilient man, and one of the world’s most courageous defenders of freedom of speech,” Gibney said in a statement. “The opportunity to make this film about his recovery – in the broadest sense of the term – comes at a critical time. It gives me hope.”

Rushdie added in a statement: “I’m delighted we have Alex working with us on this film. We have long admired his brilliant work, from Taxi to the Dark Side and Going Clear to his recent portrait of Paul Simon. There couldn’t be a better person for the job.”

Gibney has already begun production on Knife, which is seeking a distributor. The Oscar-winning film-maker’s latest project, Musk, about the entrepreneur and world’s richest man Elon Musk, is forthcoming this year from HBO.