Last weekend I had the privilege of facilitating a poetry workshop for Passover at the Moishe house in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Each year, Jews around the world gather to tell the story of our journey from being slaves in Egypt towards a hard won freedom. We have been telling this story for generations…
The photo above was taken on a poetry adventure on a train back in December when myself and a group of co-conspirators known as P.U.P!—that’s right, you guessed it: Poets in Unexpected Placesbrought our particular brand of poetry and performance magic to an unsuspecting Q train. And the one below was taken in a Laundromat where we just finished performing our poems to a group of unsuspecting weeknight washers at the Wash & Play Lotto Laundromat in Fort Greene Brooklyn…
The nice thing about this cold weather is that it makes us want to stay at home bundled up, the perfect environment for hunkering down with our pens and paper (or laptops) and doing some serious writing! So, in the spirit of winter and stoking the fires of the writer inside us all, I am encouraging you to take some time to read through the writing exercises below and give them a try…
Around the world, December is a time when light and dark are at their peak. Tonight in the northern hemisphere is the Winter Solstice—the shortest, darkest day of the year , which will transition into longer days with more light. This metaphor of darkness and light given to us by the natural world feels especially potent right now…
When I wrote to you last month, in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, and said that I was moving out of one storm and into another, I didn’t know how true that statement actually was. While I was in the Middle East, the war between Gaza and Israel broke out…
I am writing to you from Brooklyn, New York, from a place of deep gratitude, having survived Hurricane Sandy with minimal damage. All week I have been receiving calls and texts from friends and family checking to make sure everything is alright…
I don’t have my own children, but I imagine that the pride I felt last week when two of my former students opened for me at the world famous NuYorican poets café, might have given me a taste of what it’s like…
I have just returned from a mind-blowing trip to Cuba, where I spent two weeks travelling the country with my colleagues Samantha Thornhill and Justice Whitaker researching testimonial literature to bring back to our classroom this fall and shooting footage for a documentary about the experience…
Each year, I return to the Seeds of Peace camp in Maine to offer a creative writing workshop to the Delegation Leaders, men and women from Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Egypt, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and North America come together to confront their prejudices and deep seated fears by engaging in dialogue and shared activities with their so-called “enemy” in an idyllic camp setting. This year, my session came on the heels of a particularly difficult day…
The end of the year is always bittersweet for me- I am filled with pride at my students’ accomplishments, exhausted from preparing for the culminating performances, and a little sad, sending them off into the world, not sure if our paths will cross again, but always with the hope that they are leaving believing in the power of their own voices, and the importance of what they have to say to the world…
Each year, Jews around the world gather to tell the story of our journey from being slaves in Egypt towards a hard won freedom. For most of the Jews (and non-Jews) I know living in America or the West, this story is a metaphor. But there are many places, right now, where slavery or serious oppression is not a metaphor, but a very real day to day experience. …
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