Where you can hear/see MEH in the future.
I’ll be the Keynote speaker for the Educators Showcase in Brockton. A night highlighting poetry and education.
I will be leading a craft talk/generative workshop entitled Getting the Picture for the Sundress Academy for the Arts Poetry Retreat.
Getting the Picture
It’s time to be honest: for some of us, life has included shamelessly skimming long, detailed descriptions in stories to get to the plot, rolling our eyes in frustration when presented with writing prompts asking us to picture something, and never (fully) understanding what our English teachers and college professors meant when they repeatedly admonished us to “show, don’t tell.” Why? Because visual imagery hits differently for those who don’t primarily (or ever) think in pictures. The immense power of visual imagery can be lost when not fully appreciating that our creative thoughts are on a spectrum between conceptualizers and visualizers, which impacts both how we mine memories and activate our imaginations. This workshop seeks to hone the visual imagery of our writing by exploring the effect of this spectrum on both readers and writers, and by embodying visual images through personal somatic activities, social and scenic research, ekphrastic prompts, and other ways of bringing visualization into our writing from the outside.
Reading and class discussion with students at Acadia University.
Leading workshop/craft talk and a poetry reading for the final SPU MFA residency.
On the Frontlines/School Matters: K-12 Teachers Writing the Classroom
Panelists: Mahru Elahi, Marguerite Sheffer, Brittany Rogers, Matthew E. Henry, and Davon Loeb
Panel Description:
In-person event At a time when public educators are increasingly under political pressure, panelists will explore what it means to portray complex truths, dispel myths, and talk honestly about how to stay creative within top-down school systems as they find form and language for their experience with youth in the classroom. This multiracial and geographically diverse panel centers writers, editors and activists who put their K-12 classroom experience in conversation with their writing across multiple genres.
I will be a part of a panel at the Roxbury Poetry Festival with Quintin Collins, Imani Davis, and Sarah Kersey entitled Culture as Container: How Identities Serve as Forms for Writing
Identity and ancestry can create recurring signatures in writing. Plot lines, images, and other craft elements take on some unique approaches, creating containers that the writers find themselves within or rail against from piece to piece. Four writers will read from their poetry and discuss how their cultural backgrounds serve as forms for their work, highlighting specific craft elements in their own work and work of their kin writers, as well as distinct aspects of craft that they see as originating from within their communities.
The stark shift in the literary traditions from the Hebrew Bible to the New Testament limited the “acceptable” responses to the pain of exile—the expulsion from a grounding place, people, principle, and/or pathos. What one was “allowed” to say in the Hebrew Bible about suffering was largely silenced in the New Testament, and this has largely carried on throughout much of the Christian tradition. This talk will examine how this happened and attempt to reclaim the authentic voices of the oppressed in past and the present, the voices and perspectives on suffering that are often repressed within the modern Christian sensibility.
Writers Read, sponsored by the Language and Literature Department, is a special event featuring authors who read from and comment on their work.
