Occasions for Gathering: Writing our Communities
About this series:
In partnership with The Rutgers-Camden Writers House, Camden Institute Codirector Gregory Pardlo curated the “Occasions for Gathering” Series, with a focus on creative expression and opportunities for discussion, group writing, reading, collaboration, and art making. In the “Writing Our Communities” Series, participants and speakers pondered together such questions as: How does a writer create authentic partnerships that center community? And how can writing with a community effect social change?
Events in this series:
Writers Belonging to Communities, Communities Belonging to Writers | March 2, 2022
Javan Howard is a poet and writer from The Bronx, NY. He truly believes that the lived experience is the ultimate teaching tool and uses poetry as a social forum to foster discourse about love, culture, and identity. He has previously facilitated workshops across NYC with The New York State Office of Children and Family Services, Voices UnBroken, The GO Project and Wingspan Arts. He is currently a Teaching Artist for Teachers & Writers Collaborative and Usdan Summer Camp For The Arts. He is also the TAP Co-Director for Curricula, Mentorship & Facilitation at Community Word Project. Howard's work has been featured online at WNYC News, Black Heart Magazine, Brooklyn Stories Vol. 13., Poets For Peace, Zine #2: Poems For Resilience and Silver Rose Magazine. He has work forthcoming in The Broken Plate and The Minnesota Review.
Lisa Nelson-Haynes is the Executive Director of Philadelphia Young Playwrights (PYP), where she helps young people discover their potential through the art of the play. PYP is currently in 43 schools, throughout Philadelphia, Delaware and Montgomery counties, and in 92 classrooms with students in grades 2-12.
Championing the power of personal narrative and stories, Lisa’s work has long centered around empowering others to take control of their stories and voices. Fittingly, Lisa is also the Executive Producer of PYP’s award-winning podcast Mouthful. The podcast digs into the experiences and perspectives of young people to spark important conversations about big ideas and issues. An award-winning storyteller and teacher, Lisa has facilitated digital storytelling workshops for Storycenter for more than ten years. She has worked with Drexel University’s Center for Nonviolence and Social Justice’s Healing Hurt People to facilitate workshops with young people who are victims of intentional injury to craft narratives that celebrate their resiliency and triumphs.
Taylor A. Lewis is a poet and teacher originally from Atlanta. He holds a BA in English from Spelman College and an MFA in Creative Writing from Rutgers University-Camden. At Rutgers, he taught first-year composition and was a research assistant at the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice. Taylor is currently a visiting instructor at Bryn Mawr College and a teaching artist at Growing Great Writers in Camden. He is the recipient of the 2020 Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing Queer Writer Fellowship in Prose and the 2017 Edith A. Hambie Poetry Prize sponsored by the Academy of American Poets. He has poems in Auburn Avenue and Voicemail Poems.
Past events in this series
-
This event is part of a series called Writing Our Communities. Each event is a group conversation with Prof. Gregory Pardlo and guest speakers. This second event is Writers Centering Community: How does a writer grow from serving a community? How can a community grow from being served by a writer?
Featured speakers:
Carmen Balcazar-Pendleton is a visual artist that was born in Peru, in South America. She is a graduate of Purdue University, Fort Wayne, Indiana. Carmen is the proud mother of Sofia and Sergio.
Carmen has been the Community and Artist Programs Manager at Rutgers Camden Center for the Arts for the past seventeen years. Her dedication to transforming Camden schools and playgrounds through the power of visual, musical, theater and literary arts has affected the lives of residents of all ages. She has built lasting, successful art programs working with community leaders, board members, teachers, school administration, youth and senior citizens.
Carmen’s advocacy for women and children began in Indiana in 1994 when she co-founded the non-profit group Mujeres Unidas, Women United, a support group for Hispanic, immigrant women and children who are victims of domestic violence.
_________________________
Hailing from the home of the Harlem Renaissance, Kimberly “Kym” Boyce-Lazare is an Artivist and Educator with Community-Word Project and Urban Word, facilitating literary arts-integrated workshops championing healing justice.
Kym studied Linguistics, Literature, and the Language Arts at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus, in Barbados and has studied extensively within The City Universities of New York. She holds an Associate’s degree in Communication Studies and a Bachelor’s degree in Literary, Media, and Visual Arts. And she is a current Master of Arts candidate studying Arts Administration at Baruch College.
Kym is an Innovative Cultural Advocacy Fellow with the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diasporic Institute, a 2020 Mentee with Arts Administrators of Color Network, and a Mentor with iMentor. Kym also serves as the Administrative and Development Support Manager with Urban Word NYC, assisting all Urban Word initiatives, including the National Youth Poet Laureate Program.
_________________________
Caits Meissner is the director of Prison and Justice Writing at PEN America. She has taught, consulted, and co-created extensively for over 15 years across a wide spectrum of communities with a focus on prisons, public schools, and college classrooms at The New School and The City College of New York. In 2017, Meissner reenvisioned the concept of book tour for her illustrated poetry collection Let It Die Hungry, pairing public speaking engagements with opportunities to work with incarcerated writers across the United States.
-
This event is part of a series called Writing Our Communities. Each event is a group conversation with Prof. Gregory Pardlo and guest speakers. This final event is Amplifying Community Voices: How can writing with a community effect social change? What does it mean to do this work through a social justice lens?
Featured speakers
Yolanda Wisher: Poet, singer, educator, and curator Yolanda Wisher is author of Monk Eats an Afro and co-editor of the anthology Peace is a Haiku Song with mentor Sonia Sanchez. Wisher was named inaugural Poet Laureate of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania in 1999 and third Poet Laureate of Philadelphia for 2016 and 2017.
A Pew and Cave Canem Fellow, Wisher received the Leeway Foundation's Transformation Award in 2019 for her commitment to art for social change. She taught high school English for a decade, co-founded the youth-led Germantown Poetry Festival, and served as Director of Art Education for Philadelphia Mural Arts. Wisher is the founder of the School of Guerrilla Poetics, a training ground for folks interested in nurturing and mobilizing communities through poetry.
As Curator of Spoken Word and Co-Director of Curatorial Programs at Philadelphia Contemporary, Wisher has produced programs like Stellar Masses, a series of poetry church services, and Love Jawns: A Mixtape, a collection of spoken word-infused soundscapes. She performs a blend of poetry and song with her band Yolanda Wisher & The Afroeaters. Doublehanded Suite, their debut album, will be out in 2022.
Cornelius Eady: Poet/Playwright/Songwriter and Cave Canem Co-Founder Cornelius Eady was born in Rochester, NY in 1954, and is Professor of English, and Chair of Excellence at the University of Tenn. Knoxville. He is the author of several poetry collections, including Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, winner of the 1985 Lamont Prize; The Gathering of My Name, nominated for the 1992 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry; Brutal Imagination, and Hardheaded Weather. He wrote the libretto to Diedra Murray’s opera Running Man, which was short listed for the Pulitzer Prize in Theatre, and his verse play Brutal Imagination won the Oppenheimer Prize for the best first play from an American Playwright in 2001. His awards include Fellowships from the NEA, the Guggenheim Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, and was The Miller Family Endowed Chair in Literature and Writing and Professor in English and Theater at The University of Missouri-Columbia.
Lorene Cary: Having written three novels in college, Lorene Cary began her professional writing career at TIME and TV GUIDE. She then taught at St. Paul’s, the board school she attended as a scholarship student in its early days of coeducation and integration. When her children were very young, she freelanced magazine pieces, including a stint as a contributor to Newsweek, but needed to tell longer stories, through books: first, Black Ice, about being a Black girl at St. Paul’s.
Then Cary began research to see how our history had brought us to now. That resulted in an UGRR novel, The Price of a Child, which became the inaugural choice of One Book One Philadelphia, during which she also wrote a non-fiction middle-years UGRR book, Free! Great Escapes From Slavery on the Underground Railroad. Pride, a girlfriend novel, followed, and then If Sons, Then Heirs, fiction rooted in the legacy of lynching and the great migration. Ladysitting is her most recent book and has already spawned a short opera Cary wrote with composer Liliya Ugay and a play, commissioned by Arden Theatre, which premiered her first, sold-out play, My General Tubman, in Winter 2020.
Cary has taught writing at UPenn for 25 years, and founded Art Sanctuary, a Black Arts organization which grew successfully for 15 years, and is now under control of the African-American Museum in Philadelphia. The classes she teaches at UPenn now allow her students to write for #VoteThatJawn, which she created, at students’ urging, to bring 18 to 24-year-olds to the polls in Philly.