Ferguson Is Everywhere: Poetry Therapist Barbara Bethea To Lead "Black Lives Matter, Too" Reading At Barnes & Noble



“Black Lives Matter, Too”, next Monday’s timely installment of Stamford Barnes & Noble’s Open Mic program, features Barbara Bethea, the “Afrikana Madonna”, a poetess and motivational healer with a wonderfully exuberant presentation style (to which those who attended her July appearance at Curley’s last year can attest).

 A creative therapist certified through the National Association for Poetry Therapy (NAPT), Bethea works with Mt. Sinai Hospital’s Sexual Assault & Violence Intervention program as a rape counselor advocate and is an active member of the renown Afrikan Poetry Theatre in Jamaica, NY (now in its 39^th year), founded by the late John Watusi Branch and Yusef Waliyaya, poets and cultural workers in the early 1970s.

Besides helping adults achieve recovery and empowerment from chemical dependencies and intimate partner violence, Barbara’s activities supporting at-risk teens both in health care and church settings demonstrates an inspired dedication to dignity, mutual interest and empathy in pursuit of acceptance of one another and our individual struggles, transcending an oft-bandied call for mere “tolerance” or cynical recommendations on how to accommodate intolerable behavior on the part of officialdom.

While the brief video below, “Supreme Teens”, which Barbara produced in association with the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, highlights how critical an open and engaged response is to these concerns, their acute import readily applies to the future of all in an open, civil society, given the portentous escalation of police brutality and killings targeting the non-white population of the country in recent years.

Her inspirational outreach also extends to recorded material, such as Like Manna for the Soul, a nine-track CD released in 2007, and televised presentations, like this 2013 example from Manhattan Neighborhood Network's Can We Talk Television:

Barbara is an adjunct professor at the College of New Rochelle/School of New Resources, Brooklyn Campus. You can contact her directly at afrikanamadonna1@aol.com.

 

Hosted by Frank Chambers, Barnes & Noble’s Open Mic Poetry takes place the second Monday of each month in the cookbook section on the main floor of the bookstore (located in the Stamford Town Center), beginning at 7:15 p.m.

For more information, contact:

 Barnes& Noble

100 Greyrock Place, Suite H009
Stamford, CT 06906

203-323-1248

An Infinite Wingspan For Grief and Growth

Described as “an unusually accomplished debut” by Nancy Willard, Psalms for a Child Who Has Lost Her Mother (FinishingLine Press, 2015) complements Carol Japha’s personal and social humanity as an artist, editor, non-profit professional and activist, formerly with Viking Press, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Charles H. Revson Foundation and the Peace Corps.

As Tuesday’s featured reader at Curley’s, Carol will illuminate her quest “to discover the mother I lost so long ago, and myself” through samples of her spare, lyrical writing, expressing the bond between a mother and daughter, identity and connection and other themes from her first chapbook.

The distinctive, even blessed, absence of the maudlin in this detailed chronicle suggests to the author of A Shimmering That Goes with Us, Mary Ann Larkin, a subtle, freeing effect to her work: "It's under an 'infinite wingspan' that Carol Japha gathers together the painful details of a child losing her mother… with no sentimentality,” building to a “revealing achievement” which plants, as the sample below makes clear, one leg in an evolving present, with the other anchored to the legacy that propels it:  

Knapsack

I will carry her in my pocket
like a slingshot
like a candy bar
like change to buy it
like shells from the seashore.
In my knapsack
like a sweater against the cold
a trail map to find my way
a pocketknife
binoculars to see from the top of the hill.

I will ask her
which fork to take
which way to return.

February, 2015

Concurrently, Carol has developed her graphic skills (the cover painting of Psalms is her piece, “The Doll”) through a series of workshops and residencies from Bennington College and the Virginia School of Creative Arts to the Silvermine School of Art in Wilton. A Greenwich resident raised in Chicago, Carol has also studied at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and is a graduate of Barnard College.

Learn more about her work at her blog, www.motherfulchild.com.

Healing From Trauma Through Self-Expression Continues!

Join us, Saturday, September 5, for the penultimate session in a series of four independent creative therapy workshops, offered free to female survivors of sexual violence, conducted by Dr. Marianela Medrano, psychologist, poet and nationally-certified poetry therapist.

At the conclusion of the series, participants will be enriched by a selection of poems that will serve as a steady and indispensable resource in their journey through healing and will have the opportunity to share their writing in the Sanctuary of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation in downtown Stamford.

Marianela has used creative writing as a means to help people reduce stress, cope with pain and raise their level of emotional well-being. She hopes to help participants confront their trauma and give voice to difficult-to-express feelings through various forms of writing, including poetry and literature. Her own writing has appeared in her 2011 collection Diosas de la Yuca/Goddess of the Yuca (Madrid, Ediciones Torremozas), as well as numerous literary journals and anthologies in the United States and the Dominican Republic. Find out more about her practice and work here and here.

When:

9 am

September 5 & 12, 2015

Where:

The Center

733 Summer Street, Suite 503

Stamford, CT

Registration:

Rosie Enyart

203-487-0658; r.enyart@thecenter-ct.org

This FREE program, sponsored by the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Stamford, is presented by the The Center for Sexual Assault Crisis Counseling and Education, which has been offering counseling, educational outreach and support services in Darien, Greenwich, New Canaan, Norwalk, Stamford, Westport, Weston and Wilton since 1979.