Economic Justice & The Universality Of Heartache

At different times over the years serving as a lawyer, teacher and political candidate--while consistently throughout a writer and social justice activist, Richard Duffee returns to Barnes & Noble’s Open Mic as tomorrow night’s featured reader.

Sao Paulo, Brazil, 2014

Ferguson, MO, 2014

Richard’s past residence and travels in India, Nepal and numerous other countries lends universal texture to his poetry, satires, commentaries and critiques, which frequently reveal the personal heartache when the forces of culture, social policy and economics collide with human need, rights and aspirations.

The Barnes & Noble Open Mic poetry program meets the second Monday of each month in the cookbook section on the main floor of the bookstore (located in the Stamford Town Center), now beginning at 7:15 p.m.

Watertown, MA, 2013

For more information, contact:

Barnes & Noble

100 Greyrock Place, Suite H009

Stamford, CT 06901

 203-323-1248

Dances OF Fire, Flames Of Hope

Eighteen-year-old spoken-word artist and accomplished Bharatanatyan dancer Shreekari Tadepalli will share her work and insights this evening at Curley’s regarding her writing, performances and involvement with the Bhumi Project, an environmental initiative of the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and the Alliance of Religions and Conservation (a partner with the United Nations Development Programme).

Charting a nine-year course of social and spiritual action to reignite an over-urbanized humanity’s neglected bond with the Earth and its ecological support system, the five-year-old Project is specifically geared to inspiring, informing, and connecting young Hindus interested in stewardship of the planet and is named after Bhumi devi, the female personification of Earth acclaimed in various Vedic texts. Find out more at www.bhumiproject.org; a PDF document of the program can be found here.

Shreekari’s twelve years' experience studying Bharatanatyan reflects this Gaiaist symbiosis via its symbolic celebration of the eternal universe through that of the grace of the body. The narratives of most solo performances embody switching between numerous characters delineated by Carnatic classical music, movement and expression. Click here to enjoy a sampling of Shreekari’s intricate performances from her "Arts Supplement" Youtube channel (including an original interpretation of “Amazing Grace”). Below is a performance from 2010:

A classical dance form of South India going back more than 2,000 years, believed to have originated in Thanjavoor of Tamil Nadu and structured around a complex range of Adavu (steps), Hasthamudra (hand gestures) and  Bhavabhinaya (facial expressions), Bharatanatyam is a mystical reflection of fire in the human body, with four other dance styles, Odissi, Kuchipudi, Mohiniattam and Kathakali corresponding, respectively, with water, earth, air and aether.

Just back from India (where she volunteered in a hospital setting in Hyderabad) and the UK, Shreekari plans to pursue undergraduate work at Bryn Mawr College in the fall.

Cultural Gulfs, Environmental Strain, War... And An Abiding Hope

Charminar Hiderabad

Vandana Shiva, Munich (2005)

Irrepressibly dynamic peace and anti-nuclear activist, Greenwich resident Ayumi Temlock returns to PoemAlley after a two-month visit to India to talk about who she met, what she saw and the programs she participated in, conducted by such luminaries as ecology and food sovereignty activist, physicist Vandana Shiva (1993 Alternative Novel Peace Prize Winner), among others.

ISRO Manned Return Vehicle

temple ceiling

Over the last few years, Ayumi has been instrumental, independently and/or in conjunction with Greenwich/Stamford Peace Action and WESPAC Foundation, in protesting the proliferation of armed drone aircraft used against people of Yemen, Afghanistan and other nations, raising public awareness regarding the paucity of the official account of the 9/11 bombings and--a subject especially close to her--advocating for the abolition of nuclear weaponry.

 For the latter cause, Ayumi personally arranged the financing and travel arrangements to bring two Hibakusha, Takashi Morita and Junko Watanabe, from Brazil to relate their first-person accounts as survivors of the 1945 atomic bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima to UConn students, New York residents and members of PoemAlley at Curley's in 2010. Listen to their historical contributions as translated by Ayumi at 3:35 (right after Dev Crasta and Rebeka Radna's ethereal duet) in the video below of the Green Fuse PA event, held at the Unitarian Universalist Society in Stamford (UUSIS) on April 24 of that year.