Image and Imagination

Ben Clarke, Editor; Photographer, Dorothea Lange

Writer-in-residence at the Oakland Museum of California and the Oakland Public Library, Ben Clarke, re-examines Dorothea Lange's photographs along with collaborating artists including: A.K. Black, Scott Braley, Lucha Corpi, Kitty Costello, Maketa Groves, Richard Oyama, Margot Pepper, Eric Robertson, Clifton Ross, Abena Songbird, and Rhett Stuart. Using poetry, personal essay, rap and contemporary photography the artists explore the intersection between Lange's documentary photography and current realities.

Related items:

Stories from El Barrio

Piri Thomas

Piri Thomas, who reached millions of readers with his bestselling autobiography, Down These Mean Streets, now gives readers of all ages a vivid slice of the life in El Barrio—a place where people face their problems with energy, ingenuity and love. He draws vivid stories from his past experiences and makes us feel what it means to be poor and proud and generous; to be streetwise and full of bravado but frightened, too; to struggle to go straight; to be ashamed of being ashamed; to dream.
Related items:

Through the Wall: A Year in Havana

Margot Pepper

Margot Pepper's memoir propels us through the blockade to post-cold war Cuba. It's a surreal world where high-ranking officials are required to pick up hitch-hikers. Root canals, cosmetic surgery and graduate school are free, but toilet paper is exorbitant. There's no income tax nor homelessness, yet no house-paint either. As the story unfolds, Margot pursues a passionate love affair with a penniless Mexican poet who shakes up her views about Cuba.

Related items:

Back to the Streets

George Wynn

In Back to the Streets, George Wynn tells stories of a nation’s poor. Bracing, realistic, archetypal, with a steady-handed objectivity, the writing follows the way cut by Dos Passos and Steinbeck. The vivid sketches gathered in this collection offer glimpses of lives led inside the 21st century Depression.
“George Wynn writes with toughness, sympathy, and great humor about difficult things and dire situations, and wonderfully about the redeeming qualities of literature and human kindness. He makes invisible people visible, and throws light in the darkest of places.”
Elizabeth McCracken
Author of The Giant's House
Related items:

test

Clifton Ross

Goddesses We Ain't

Edited by Lucy Bledsoe

This anthology offers poetry, short stories, performance pieces and autobiographical memoirs that were developed in the Tenderloin Reflection and Education Center's Women Writers Workshop. A dozen women from different cultures explore the landscape of love, language, literacy and liberation. In forms as diverse as the personalities of the participants. Edited and introduced by workshop facilitator, Lucy Jane Bledsoe, the collection cuts to the heart of women's concerns today.

Related items:

Not by Bread Alone

B. Jesse Clarke
A Perspective on the Tenderloin Reflection Education Center
In 1981, a group of activists associated with the Franciscan peace and justice movement came together in San Francisco's Tenderloin to create a reflection and education center that would "take into account the perspectives of the underside of history, the experiences and struggles of the 'jagged edge'-- all those in our society who are not treated as full human beings." Beginning with a Bible discussion group organized on the model of liberation theology activists in Latin America, the Tenderloin Reflection and Education Center has evolved into one of the Bay area's longest lived cultural and spiritual organizations of and for homeless and dispossessed persons.

Related items:

Venezuela: Revolution from the Inside Out

Clifton Ross

Venezuela: Revolution from the Inside Out is a voyage into Latin America's most exciting experiment of the new millennium, exploring the history and projects of the Bolivarian Revolution through interviews with a range of its participants, from academics to farm workers and those living in the margins of Caracas. This introduction to the revolucion bonita (pretty revolution) offers in-depth interviews, unforgettable images and a lively soundtrack that will open new vistas onto this hopeful human project.

Related items:

Poverty Rights, Media Wrongs

In the wake of sustained attacks on homeless people by corporate media outlets such as the San Francisco Chronicle and the relative dearth of poverty rights coverage from alternative media organizations, Media Alliance is launching Poverty Rights Media Wrongs.

12next ›last »
Syndicate content