Each year, we love taking part in the Poetry Coalition's month of dedicated programming. The Poetry Coalition is a national alliance dedicated to working together to promote the value poets bring to our culture and the important contribution poetry makes in the lives of people of all ages and backgrounds. Members are nonprofit multi-genre literary organizations that serve poets of specific racial, ethnic, or gender identities, backgrounds, or communities, and we are proud to be a founding member. Each March, members present programming across the country on a theme of social importance. March 2020's theme is "I am deliberate / and afraid / of nothing: Poetry & Protest." Read more about this month's programming here!
For this year's social impact March programming with the Poetry Coalition, we have two special projects. We'll be presenting Poetry of Protest: A Workshop with Purvi Shah at The Ace Hotel New York on March 15th. This workshop will examine poetic engagement with protest, particularly the connections of public engagement, craft, and lyrical activism on the page and shared aloud in the world. We will draw upon mentor poems to guide our discussion of the techniques poets use to develop a landscape of protest and action, and we will practice using these techniques in our own writing via a series of prompts. Please register in advance if you are interested!
We will also be hosting our annual Postcard Project! Fellows will be writing and mailing one postcard poem each day while meditating on the theme of poetry and protest. Please join us by writing your own postcards and sending them out. We'll be uploading pictures of postcards all month on our social media. You can tweet us @kundimanforever or email an image of your postcard to communications@kundiman.org. Make sure to use the Poetry Coalition hashtags #PoetryandProtest and #PoetryCoalition!
