Raising Awareness and Engaging the Community through Poetry

by Marlene Jezierski

Some of society’s greatest outrages have been precipitated from storytelling: loss of a Braille computer to a thief; loss of limbs in Iraq; loss of a child to a predator; loss of a life to domestic violence. Stories told often result in stimulating community engagement and action. Unfortunately, emotional abuse in intimate relationships is not often described in news stories, nor is it as well understood for what it is: power and control.

by Mary Carroll Moore

When Walter Wellesley “Red” Smith said, “There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein,” he was talking about the vulnerability a writer must bring to the page.

Writers struggle with this vulnerability. How much of their lives should be on the page? How do they stay present and immediate with their writing, and live a normal, functional life?

by Donna Trump

You’re an artist. What if something happened to you—a massive stroke or head injury, for example—that made it impossible for you to write, paint, sculpt, compose? Or suppose you were born with a disability that similarly disallowed most means of artistic expression. Imagine it: your active, original mind generating unique ideas, yet unable to communicate them, through any medium, to the world. Given the same “you” inhabiting that body, what would become of the skills, the techniques, the creative spirit you longed to share?