Dear Friends:
This April we rejoice in the renewal of everything life-affirming. Nature's rebirth of beauty goes without saying, but also we celebrate renewal within. Anyone emerging from personal grief, social hardship, or simply the long darkness of winter has something to express, and what better way to open one’s heart than through poetry!
Intern MariVi Madiedo has found short but keen selections from several of our books that feature poetry, and noted that most all our authors, even the most practical activists, include some piece of poetic incentive. We hope you enjoy our springtime mix of news and verse . . . and keep the muses dancing first!
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Professor Fullilove spoke with
Public Seminar
editor Evangeline Riddiford Graham about telling Ernest Thompson’s story of community organizing for African American rights, and what his achievements mean today.
"Organize with a preference for the poor and working people. Build coalition. Throw the moneylenders out of the temple." ~ Dr. Mindy Thompson Fullilove shares her father's lessons in activism in a new edition of
Homeboy Came to Orange
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"
Kids value things that often get pushed aside by big-money interests. For example, in literally every single piece of work we’ve ever done with kids, they’re always (especially the younger kids) requesting more nature in their spaces—more animals, more plants, more flowers, colors. It’s just part of how they are biologically designed. They’re 'biophilic.'"
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Spoon Jackson, coauthor of
By Heart: Poetry, Prison, and Two Lives
,
is one of the podcast producers for
Uncuffed
,
a radio series produced by men inside Solano State Prison in Vacaville, California. With the help of KALW producers, Spoon and his cohorts record and edit interviews with other prisoners. The topics are their own, and their
truthful podcasts reveal the human side of incarceration.
Listen to Spoon's most recent podcast:
"Life without the possibility of parole — LWOP — is a sentence in some ways equal to the death penalty. It means you will spend the rest of your life in prison. The only reprieve is by a governor's commutation or pardon, which is as rare as snow in Barstow, California."
Spoon, we hear you!
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May 22–26, Brooklyn, NY:
Placemaking with Children and Youth
coauthors, Louise Chawla and Mara Mintzer, will both be presenters at the 50th anniversary conference of the Environmental Design Research Association, EDRA50.
New Village Press will also have a full book table.
Come visit us!
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June 21–22, New York, Tacoma, & Montreal
In cities throughout the nation and world people are facing powerful economic and political forces that lead to evictions from their homes and displacement from their communities. In response, people are organizing, resisting, and developing their own plans and policies as alternatives. The conference will explore strategies that affirm another world is possible! New Village Press is a conference cosponsor and will exhibit books in NYC.
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October 18–20, Albuquerque, New Mexico
The Imagining America Gathering is an annual convening of public scholars, artists, students, designers, and cultural organizers who are addressing the nation’s most critical issues. Come connect, dialogue, learn, and strategize about the ways the arts, humanities, and design build public knowledge and collective imagination!
And visit our New Village Press book table at IA.
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As New Village author, Spoon Jackson, says, “writing… [is] a journey,
sometimes sad, happy, loving, and mad, but it [is] all the time real.”
During this year’s National Poetry Month, we take a little time to
highlight poems and poets of New Village Press.
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Anything you want there to be more of,
Do it randomly.
Don't wait for reasons.
It will make itself
Be more
Senselessly.
Scrawl it on the wall--
Random Kindness and Senseless Acts of Beauty
~Anne Herbert & Margaret Paloma Pavel
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Green moss on a rock
Water-christened
Deep in the rain-draped ravine
_______
~Joseph
Sheets of rain
The cherry blossoms turn skyward
to drink
_______
~Madeline
Capture the moment
Observe nature as best you can
preserve the image
~Leo
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Restless, unable to sleep
Keys, bars, guns being racked
Year after year
Endless echoes
Of steel kissing steel
~Spoon Jackson
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Seven Fragments (found inside my father)
Fragment #6
gentlemen, it's that time again
& we rise as one
line the stairwell in our white
johnnies, a number
tied to our wrists
~Nick Flynn
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Chellis Glendinning has written a memoir evoking the lives of women and men she has known. From Susan Griffin to Daniel and Patricia Ellsberg, Suzan Harjo to John Ross, they are some the most creative and courageous geniuses of a generation: scientists, artists, ecologists, whistleblowers, booksellers, socialists, anarchists, philosophers, internationalists, healers, activists all. Glendinning's portraits are uniquely intimate even as they explore her subjects' powerful conviction and passion for justice. In depicting how they shaped her, Glendinning shows how their legacy shapes us, her readers.
In the Company of Rebels
is one of the most profoundly moving books I've read in years.
—Margaret Randall, author,
Exporting Revolution
, as well as many dozen books of poetry and prose
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From the first vivid chapter set in Sicily to her gutsy activism in the U.S., LaSpina’s triumphant memoir of a richly lived life held me rapt.
—Alix Kates Shulman
This beautifully written memoir is Nadina La Spina's story, from her early years in her native Sicily, where as a baby she contracts polio and becomes the object of pity and messages of hopelessness; to her adolescence and youth in America, spent in and out of hospitals, where she is relentlessly operated on in the quest for a cure; to her struggles to fit in to the ableist world as a woman and as a professional; and to her rebellion and powerful, life-affirming activism in the disability rights movement.
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The Path to a Just Future
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April 5, New York, NY
A transdisciplinary panel will discuss how we move ideas to implementation
focused on organizing, advocacy, development of equitable planning policies and
setting us on a Path to a Just Future.
Program: 5:30–8:00PM, Pratt Manhattan,
144 W 14th St
. Free and open to the public.
Look for the New Village Press book table.
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Teatro Dallas will present a dramatic reading of
Conversations with Diego Rivera
at Turner House, where the Oak Cliff Society of Fine Arts hosts cultural events free for the public. The director of Teatro Dallas, Sara Cardona, is the grandaughter of Alfredo Cardona, the author of this extraordinary set of interviews with Mexican muralist Diego Rivera.
Program: Starts at 7:30PM. Details to come!
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In community,
Lynne Elizabeth
Director, New Village Press
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