Power of Words Conference: Transformation, Liberation & Celebration through the Spoken, Written and Sung Word

Jimmy Santiago Baca, Sha Cage & E. G. Bailey, Darren Canady and Xanath Caraza

 “How can one diminish the power of words and what they have done to me? They’ve changed my life, taught me to love, described what deep learning is, opened my eyes, shaped my speech, all bound together and much more to give me an amazing life, and this conference swells with that importance. It’s the epiphany and epicenter of using language to learn to love ourselves and others.” — Jimmy Santiago Baca

 

Join us September 18-20, 2015 at Unity Village in Kansas City, MO for our 12th Power of Words Conference: Transformation, Liberation & Celebration Through the Spoken, Written and Sung Word, with workshops, performances, talking circles, celebration and more, featuring writers, storytellers, performers, musicians, community leaders, activists, educators, and health professionals. The conference, founded in 2003, features workshops in four tracks: narrative medicine, social change, right livelihood (and making a living through the arts), ecological literacy, and engaged spirituality. See details at http://www.tlanetwork.org/conference/3742-2/. Scholarships, work-study and day rates available.

                    

Keynoters

 

 

Jimmy Santiago Baca

 

 

Jimmy Santiago Baca, born in New Mexico of Native American and Mexican descent, went from being a teenage runaway and inmate at a maximum security prison to one of America’s most beloved poets. His books include poetry collections, prose, and an award-winning memoir, A Place to Stand, which was also the basis for a new film of the same title. Baca has devoted his post-prison life to teaching others who are overcoming hardship, and writing about barrios, addiction, injustice, education, community, love and beyond. He has conducted hundreds of writing workshops in prisons, community centers, libraries, and universities throughout the country, and in 2005, founded Cedar Tree, Inc. to bring education and encouragement to people of many backgrounds.

 

Sha Cage is an interdisciplinary artist, actress, playwright, poet, director, filmmaker, producer, and visual artist. She is co-founder, artistic and managing director of MaMa mOsAiC, a woman of color performance collective, and she has been featured in many plays and performances, including with Penumbra Theatre, Pangea World Theatre, and Theare De la Jeune Lune. She is development director of Tru Ruts Endeavors, and the Minnesota SpokenWord Association, which she co-founded with her husband, E.G. Bailey.

 

E.G. Bailey is a Liberian-born multidisciplinary artist, actor, spoken word artist, filmmaker, playwright, director, and producer. Since ’95, he has co-founded and co-produced Write On RaDio!, an award-winning weekly literary radio program on KFAI Fresh Air Radio, and Arkology, an award-winning spoken word and music collective. His album American Afrikan was recently nominated for an Independent Music Award, and he is executive director of the Minnesota Spoken Word Association, which he co-founded with his wife, Sha Cage.

 

Sha Cage & E. G. Bailey

 

 

MADIBA [Muh•Dee•Buh]: This uniquely innovative performance duet has auspiciously adopted the South African leader, Nelson Mandela’s widely known nickname. E.G. Bailey and Shá Cage respectively from Liberia and Mississippi represent the diasporic legacy of continent of Africa and the American South. Theirs is a performance collaboration blending and bending words, layered voices, and cacophonous rhythms reminiscent of Sekou Sundiata mixed with Jessica Care Moore.

 

Darren Canady

 

 

Darren Canady’s work has been seen at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center, the Alliance Theatre, Horizon Theatre, Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the Fremont Centre Theatre, Congo Square Theatre, the BE Company, American Blues Theater and Kansas City’s own Barn Theater. Darren is an alum of Carnegie Mellon University, New York University, and the Juilliard School. He is a former member of Primary Stages’ Dorothy Strelsin New Writers Group, the T.S. Eliot US/UK Exchange, and the America-In-Play theatre collective. He currently teaches playwriting at the University of Kansas.

 

Xanath Caraza

 

Xánath Caraza is a traveler, educator, poet and short story writer. Her book of poetry, Sílabas de viento / Syllables of Wind, received the 2015 International Book Award for Poetry.  It also received Honorable Mention for Best Book of Poetry in Spanish in the 2015 International Latino Book Awards.  Caraza is a writer for La Bloga and she writes the “US Latino Poets en español” column.  In addition, she writes the poetry/narrative section for Revista Zona de Ocio.

Voices Born In La Pinta

Author and Poet Honored with Luis Leal Literature Award

[press release]

Jimmy Santiago Baca could easily have pursued a life of crime. Sentenced as a young man to five years in a maximum-security prison, he was well on his way. While incarcerated, however, Baca learned to read and write, and found he had a passion for poetry. After serving his time, he chose to leave prison not as a hardened criminal, but as a new writer.

Now an award-winning poet, novelist, and essayist, Baca is the recipient of UC Santa Barbara's 2010 Luis Leal Award for Distinction in Chicano/Latino Literature. The award, which is co-sponsored by the Santa Barbara Book Council, was presented at a ceremony at 4 p.m. on Thursday, October 28, in the campus's Corwin Pavilion.

Born in New Mexico of Indio-Mexican descent, Baca is the recipient of several awards and honors, including the Pushcart Prize, the American Book Award for Poetry, the International Hispanic Heritage Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and the International Prize, which he received for his novel, A Place to Stand. He has held a Regents Chair at UC Berkeley, The Wallace Stevens Endowed Chair at Yale University, and The Endowed Hulbert Chair at Colorado College.

“From the time I starting writing 32 years ago, Mr. Leal was my inspiration,” Baca said of the scholar for whom the award is named. “I aspired to follow his model in scholarship, compassion, creativity, and commitment, but I soon realized few can do so. He stands alone. It is such a great privilege and honor to receive the Luis Leal Award and brings at least one of my dreams full circle - that my name would be associated with his one day.”

Baca jump-started his writing career in the late 1970s by sending three poems - from prison - to Denise Levertov, a poet herself, and the poetry editor at that time for Mother Jones magazine. His work was published in the magazine and later appeared in a volume titled “Immigrants in Our Own Land,” which came out in 1979 - the year he was released. He earned his general education diploma (GED) a few months later, and then went on to the University of New Mexico, where he completed a Bachelor of Arts degree in English. In 2003, he received an honorary doctorate in literature from the same university.

“Jimmy Santiago Baca is a voice of Chicano survival in a country that has too often marginalized Chicanos and other Latinos,” said Mario T. García, professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies and of history at UCSB. García is also the organizer of the Leal award.

The author of more than 11 volumes of poetry and three novels, Baca has been a guest on several radio and television programs, including National Public Radio's All Things Considered, Good Morning America, Language of Life with Bill Moyers, and CBS Sunday Morning.

Devoted not only to his craft but to teaching others who are overcoming hardship, Baca established Cedar Tree Inc., a nonprofit foundation in New Mexico that conducts literary workshops in prisons and detention centers, and at community centers and schools for at-risk youth. The organization's mission is to provide underserved communities with the tools necessary to overcome obstacles to learning.

In 2006, Baca received the Cornelius P. Turner Award, a national honor presented annually to a GED graduate who has made outstanding contributions to society in the areas of education, justice, health, public service, and social welfare.

The Leal Award is named in honor of Luis Leal, professor emeritus of Chicana and Chicano Studies at UCSB, who was internationally recognized as a leading scholar of Chicano and Latino literature. Previous recipients of the award include Graciela Limón, Pat Mora, Alejandro Morales, Helena Maria Viramontes, Oscar Hijuelos, Rudolfo Anaya, and Denise Chávez. Luis Leal died in January of this year at the age of 102.

Source: UCSB

Bookstore puts up a fight

The sign reads Resistencia Bookstore, but according to caretaker Rene Valdez, the space inside is more than just a place for selling books.

"It is a space of written resource, but the idea is that it became a safe-space that organizers and activists could come and exchange ideas," Valdez said. "We use ‘bookstore' loosely, but the vision is more a community center to hear people's victories and struggles."

The late Raúl Salinas founded the Resistencia Bookstore in 1982. Salinas was a former adjunct professor who taught in the communications department at St. Edward's University. He is known as a Chicano beat poet and social justice advocate. During his time at St. Edward's, Salinas taught courses about social movements and multicultural communication.

"He inspired so many students and was such a presence to have here," professor Tere Garza said.

Resistencia Bookstore is a part of the legacy Salinas left behind.

"We're a grassroots operation and a mom-and-pop five and dime shop," Valdez said. "We don't aspire to be Barnes and Noble or even a Book People."

Read the rest of this story from Hilltop Views, by Kristina Schenck, at this link.

Ricardo Sánchez

Chicano Timespace: The Poetry and Politics of Ricardo Sánchez
Miguel R. López
Texs A&M University Press, 2001

[publisher blurb]


The premature death of Ricardo Sánchez in 1995 marked the passing of an almost legendary figure in Chicano literature and in the Chicano political movement. A troubadour of Chicano Movement poetry, he established an anti-aesthetic that became the norm. Sánchez's autobiographical poetry forges a link between genres of the past and present and establishes him as the first great tragic figure of contemporary Chicano literature.In a body of work that spanned spatial, temporal, and cultural boundaries, Sánchez dealt with issues of power and of linguistic and cultural barriers between Anglo, Native American, and Mexican American peoples in the United States.While he lived, critics showed reluctance to engage Sánchez's work fully, perhaps in part because of his reputation as a confrontational, even outrageous individual. Focusing on Canto y grito mi liberación and Hechizospells, Miguel R. López examines Sánchez's work and places him in the context of the past, present, and future of Chicano literature. López explains clearly the relation of time and space in Sánchez's prolific work and shows him as a writer committed to his craft as well as to his political stance. In the end, the portrait that emerges is of a poet whose work was linguistically and thematically complex and one who was more passionate, controversial, and forthright in his expression than any other contemporary Chicano writer.

“The poetry of Ricardo Sánchez is here examined with a clinical eye in order to bring out its deep meaning and reveal its multiple values. For the first time the principal works of a major movimiento poet are evaluated in the context of his turbulent spacetime taking into consideration the author’s tragic life. The result is a tour de force seldom equaled in Chicano/a criticism concerned with the study of a single poet.”--Luis Leal, University of California-Santa Barbara.

Later.

Guest Columnist: Jean Gillis. A Valentine for Jimmy Santiago Baca.

Jean Gillis teaches English in a Continuation High School. This is her first guest column at La Bloga. She blogs about her teaching experiences at "Dating Yourself in Pasadena."

Jimmy Santiago Baca . A Place to Stand. The Making of a Poet. NY: Grove Press, 2002.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-3908-5

Those of you who know me are aware of my challenging and poignant job as a teacher at a continuation high school. My students are mostly boys, not keen on reading, more than disaffected by a whole lot of things in life. But god love them, they are usually fairly tolerant of my attempts to bring academic order to our school lives. (At our school the kids address me by the honorific MISS.) As one fella said, when I was trying to gain his attention, "Oh, go ahead, Miss, teach. Do your little thing."

A couple of years ago I was galvanized by reading a paperback called A PLACE TO STAND, by Jimmy Santiago Baca. This book was the answer to my prayer, because I needed something substantial to read with my kids that would speak to them on a genuine level. The book contains innumerable harsh life experiences, explicit language, and a verity laced with crime and punishment and survival. All this fits my students' milieu. Trouble is, if you are a learner reading at second to fifth grade level, but you are a young adult,even a great book like this might be beyond you. Still, I had to have this book. I wrote a little grant and purchased a class set the first year we tried it.

I have to say that in class I read the entire book out loud, but it is a guided reading. The students read along with me, and we build up our stamina so that we can concentrate on the story for up to 30 minutes a class period. My students may not have experienced that childhood luxury of being read to. In fact, one of them remarked to me, "You know what, Miss? I'm gonna get my diploma and then open an after-school homework center and hire you to read out loud!" I replied that I would dig it and that I might be in the market for some part-time work one of these days. But it is the potency of the narrative that hooks them. How many times have they told me that they have never read a whole book until this one? It's so important to me that they read, that they feel invited to that table of readers and not hang back in the shadows of the excluded. (And it doesn't hurt that A PLACE TO STAND is highly cinematic in spots.)

One of my old teaching chums used to say she reserved time in class for preaching, and I do that too. When I preach, I always tell the kids I am that other mother they never knew they had. This particular book is rife with redemption but never in either a saccharine or lachrymose tone. Instead, this book is about LITERACY--about how we all can release life's pent-up emotion through thinking and reading and writing. I couldn't have asked for better preaching material had I devised it myself.

One small problem is that these books vanish. Everyone asks to take them home and we don't have enough to go around. In fact, I had to order ten more from Amazon for this quarter's go round. But I don't feel like I'm paying fare to Charon to enter the Land of the Dead. Far from it. This is my investment in our vida together.

La Bloga welcomes and actively solicits guest columns like Jean Gillis' today. If you have a book or arts review, a literary experience, something from your writer's notebook that you want to share with La Bloga, click here to discuss your idea.