Ensuring the legacy of Theresa-India Young, New England fiber artist

Jackie McRath, NEPC poet, is raising money to administer the 2021 Invitational Theresa-India Young Show at the Piano Gallery and to complete a documentary of her life and work (more information below).

Please consider making a donation if you’re able, and please share the fundraiser (and information about Theresa) with others who might be interested.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-create-theresa039s-legacy?fbclid=IwAR3RtbZF0fOOcre8oQfVajrxD2nuc-aVJ__Fj8Y_gSe6iF0nQXo-LWK1P8o

Theresa-India Young (1950-2008), fiber artist, teacher, and griot devoted her professional life to studying world cultures, nature and the practices of European tapestry, Ikat, Kente, Backstrap, and Navaho weaving.  She taught these diverse cultural and artistic skills at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston for twenty years.  Prior to her appointment at the MFA, she taught costume/textile design at the Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts and Roxbury Community College. 

Sunday, June 21st, 3 pm the annual Student Contest Poetry Reading

Join us this Sunday, June 21st, 3 pm, for the Student Contest Poetry Reading, with winners from local schools, grades 3-12, and this year’s Victor Howes Prize in Poetry winner, Jessica Chretien, recent graduate of Plymouth State University; you can find her @infuturereverse on Twitter, and on Instagram @absolutelynthng

Please register in advance using this link: https://bit.ly/studentpoetry2020

Congratulations to Ann Taylor on the publication of her new book!

Sortings is a collection of poems focusing on the process of making distinctions, reflecting on life’s experiences, trying to discover and express what really mattered and continues to matter. The book explores a variety of subjects – childhood and growing up, the natural world, travel, artworks, and teaching. A major focus of this collection is the sorting through recent experiences with the poet’s mother as she traveled from the vital, funny, ironic, loving person she was, to becoming a 96-year-old elder struggling with the torments of dementia. The book has a kind of emotional coherence and a narrative arc, moving from memory to more recent subjects that inevitably link the now to the then.

https://www.dosmadres.com/shop/sortings-by-ann-taylor/

Summer Poetry Festival!

Please join us for these virtual readings! Free and open to the public.

Easy registration:

July 12, 3 pm
Poet Wrestling in the Land of a Thousand Dances: Rosebud Ben-Oni
https://bit.ly/rosebud-ben-oni

July 26, 3 pm  
Spirit Boxing: Afaa Michael Weaver
https://bit.ly/afaa-michael-weaver
 
August 9, 3 pm
Poetry in Translation: Maria Luisa Arroyo and Peter Covino
https://bit.ly/poetry-in-translation

https://bit.ly/afaa-michael-weaver

Congratulations to NEPC member, Carolyne Wright, winner of a 2020-21 Fulbright Scholar Award!

Carolyne Wright (lifetime NEPC member since 1992), has received a 2020-2021 Fulbright Scholar Award to Bahia, Brazil, which she hopes to take up after the global COVID-19 travel advisory is lifted. Her most recent book is This Dream the World: New & Selected Poems (Lost Horse Press, 2017), whose title poem won the NEPC’s Firman Houghton Award as well as a Pushcart Prize, and was also included in The Best American Poetry 2009. Also appearing in 2017 was the bilingual sequence Trazas de mapa, trazas de sangre / Map Traces, Blood Traces by Chilean poet Eugenia Toledo (Mayapple Press, 2017), a Finalist for the 2018 Washington State Book Award and the 2018 PEN America-Los Angeles Award in Translation. Wright was co-editor of the ground-breaking anthology, Raising Lilly Ledbetter: Women Poets Occupy the Workspace (Lost Horse, 2015), which received ten Pushcart Prize nominations and was a finalist in the Foreword Review’s Book of the Year Awards. She has nine other volumes of poetry (including the Blue Lynx Prize and American Book Award-winning Seasons of Mangoes & Brainfire), a collection of essays, and four other award-winning volumes of poetry in translation from Spanish and Bengali.  Wright has served as Visiting Poet and Writer at colleges and universities throughout the U.S., including Harvard, Radcliffe, Emory University and the University of Miami. She returned in 2005 to her native Seattle, where she teaches for Richard Hugo House, the Whidbey Writers Workshop MFA Program (from 2005 until the program’s closure in 2016), and for national and international literary conferences and festivals. She has received grants from the NEA, 4Culture, Seattle’s Office of Arts & Culture, and the Instituto Sacatar in Bahia, Brazil.