Poetry Zooming Today: Gary Copeland Lilley and Jourdan Imani Keith
Jourdan Imani Keith
Yesterday’s email brought this announcement from Kate Reavey:
Peninsula College invites you to participate in the next offering of Conversations Toward a Culture of Justice on August 6, from 4:00 – 6:00 pm, via Zoom.
Peninsula College’s summer conversation series was inspired by Nitasha Lewis, Upward Bound Manager and Peninsula College student, who worked with Dr. Helen Lovejoy and Dr. Kate Reavey to create this safe space for dialogue and discussion. The co-facilitators see this as a valuable educational framework we can offer to students and to the larger communities we serve.
This spring The Peninsula College Board of Trustees adopted a resolution, urging the college community to take “actions that seek to dismantle systemic inequality and bias [and] confront hate and violence.’ These conversations are a step toward this important and necessary work.
We are delighted to welcome poets Gary Copeland Lilley and Jourdan Imani Keith, who will begin with a poetry reading.
The City of Seattle’s 2019 -2021 Civic Poet, Jourdan Imani Keith is a storyteller, essayist, playwright, naturalist and activist. She is the author of the anthem Let Seattle Be and a student of Sonia Sanchez. Her TEDx Talk, “Your Body of Water,” the theme for King County’s 2016-2018 Poetry on Buses program won an Americans for the Arts award. Her poetry is largely anthologized and was long listed by Danez Smith for Cosmonauts Avenue poetry prize. Keith’s Orion Magazine essays, “Desegregating Wilderness” and “At Risk” were selected for the 2015 Best American Science and Nature Writing Anthology (Houghton Mifflin). She has been awarded fellowships from Hedgebrook, Wildbranch, Santa Fe Science Writing workshop, VONA, and Jack Straw. Her memoir in essays, Tugging at the Web is forthcoming from University of Washington Press. She is the founder and director of Urban Wilderness Project.
Gary Copeland Lilley is the author of eight books of poetry, the most recent being The Bushman’s Medicine Show, from Lost Horse Press (2017), and a chapbook, The Hog Killing, from Blue Horse Press (2018). He is originally from North Carolina and now lives in the Pacific Northwest. He has received the Washington DC Commission on the Arts Fellowship for Poetry. He is published in numerous anthologies and journals, including Best American Poetry 2014, Willow Springs, The Swamp, Waxwing, the Taos International Journal of Poetry, and the African American Review. He is a Cave Canem fellow.
This series is co-sponsored by Studium Generale, Magic of Cinema, PC Forks, the Peninsula College English Department, PC Library/Media Center, and ʔaʔk̓ʷustəƞáwt̓xʷ House of Learning, PC Longhouse. We are grateful for generous contributions to the Peninsula College Foundation.
For more information, contact Dr. Helen Lovejoy, hlovejoy@pencol.edu
Kate wrote: Please invite and encourage anyone who would like to attend the reading to do so. Everyone is invited!
Here is the Zoom link to share: https://zoom.us/j/
will offer a poetry reading tomorrow afternoon (8.6.20) followed by a conversation and dialogue with the audience/participants. If you have time, please consider joining us. This is FREE and open to the public, so please feel free to share widely.
I plan to attend; it would great to see you there.
Thanks, Bethany.
Valuable writers. I’ll try to make it.
Esther
I saw you! Wasn’t that stunning?