Image and Imagination
Ben Clarke, Editor; Photographer, Dorothea LangeWriter-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.
Stories from El Barrio
Piri ThomasThrough the Wall: A Year in Havana
Margot PepperMargot 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.
Back to the Streets
George Wynn“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
Toilets
Eric Robertson
Question: What do people use thousands of gallons of fresh water for each year? Washing dishes? Cooking meals? Watering gardens? All of these answers are correct. But I was thinking of flushing toilets. That's right, we use thousands of gallons of fresh, clean, drinking water just to flush our feces and urine down the commode. It's pretty nifty and hands free, but it is an awful waste of good water when other methods are just as good.
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Letters from Another Continent
Clifton RossClifton Ross is the special correspondent for Encuentros de Las Americas a research and education project co-sponsored by TREC, CENSA and City Lights Books.
Aprons
Eric Robertson
Grandma had three kitchen drawers full of folded aprons
pinks, light blues, spring greens, yellow,
gold, polka-dotted, striped, square-cut and scalloped
Aprons to cook in and clean
and for my sister and me
aprons to tie on like capes and run
batman and robin-style
through the house screaming
bada dada dada dada BATMAN!
Joining ranks at every carpeted corner
Freezing and splitting off again with
dramatic orders--You go that way
Grandma took the aprons off the laundry line
pinks, light blues, spring greens, yellow,
gold, polka-dotted, striped, square-cut and scalloped
Aprons to cook in and clean
and for my sister and me
aprons to tie on like capes and run
batman and robin-style
through the house screaming
bada dada dada dada BATMAN!
Joining ranks at every carpeted corner
Freezing and splitting off again with
dramatic orders--You go that way
Grandma took the aprons off the laundry line
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Welcome to the blog of blogs Freedom Voices
Freedom Voices
Here is where the fun ends and the real writing starts. Get to work you writers!
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.
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