Dialogue Through Poetry
dal 19/3/2002 al 20/3/2002
Segnalato da
19/3/2002
Dialogue Through Poetry
Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School, New York
UNESCO's World Poetry Day Reading. Breytenbach, Sanchez, Olds & others. Can poetry create a culture of peace and non-violence in the world?
UNESCO World Poetry Day
Featured poets and readers: Breyten Breytenbach, Sonia Sanchez, Sharon Olds
Shashi Tharoor & Bob Holman.
TOPIC: Can poetry create a culture of peace and non-violence in the world?
Breyten Breytenbach, a South African poet, addresses the issue of exile
in his In Memory of Snow and Dust where he pieces together the lives of
three exiles living in Paris. He has also co-founded the Goree Foundation,
on the Goree Islands off the coast of Senegal, which helps promote democratic
unity on the African continent. In 1991 he went back for the first time
to South Africa, a three-month trip which he recounts in A Return To Paradise.
He is also the author of The Memory of Birds in Time of Revolution and Lady
One: Of Love, and Other Poems.
Sonia Sanchez is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry, including
Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems; which won an American Book
Award from the Before Columbus Foundation; I've Been a Woman: New and Selected
Poems and others. She has received are the Community Service Award from
the National Black Caucus of State Legislators, the Lucretia Mott Award,
the Outstanding Arts Award from the Pennsylvania Coalition of 100 Black
Women, the Peace and Freedom Award from Women International League for Peace
and Freedom (WILPF) and others. She lives in Philadelphia.
Sharon Olds numerous honors include a National Endowment for the Arts grant;
a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship; the San Francisco Poetry Center Award
for her first collection, Satan Says; and the Lamont Poetry Selection and
the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Dead & the Living (1983).
She was named New York State Poet in 1998 and lives in NYC.
Shashi Tharoor has worked for the United Nations, serving with the UN High
Commissioner for Refugees, whose Singapore office he headed during the "boat
people" crisis. Since October 1989, he has been a senior official at UN
HQ in New York, where, until late 1996, he was responsible for peacekeeping
operations in the former Yugoslavia. From January 1997 to July 1998, he
was executive assistant to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. In July 1998,
he was appointed director of communications and special projects in the
office of the Secretary-General. In January 2001, he was appointed by the
Secretary-General as interim head of the Dept. of Public Information. Tharoor
books include Reasons of State; The Great Indian Novel; The Five-Dollar
Smile & Other Stories; and a second novel, Show Business.
Bob Holman's produced for PBS, The United States of Poetry, aired nationally
in 1996, featuring over sixty poets. He co-edited Aloud! Voices from the
Nuyorican Poets Café, the winner of the American Book Award and a selection
of the Quality Paperback Book Club. He won three Emmys over six seasons
producing Poetry Spots for WNYC-TV, received a Bessie Performance Award.
Holman is the author of a CD, Out Crowd.
Wednesday, March, 20 2002 from 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM
FREE
The New School, Tishman Auditorium
66 West 12th St., New York City