Spring Writes Literary Festival

Schedule:

2:00pm to 3:15pm: Mixing It Up: Community Storytelling from Cornell's MIlstein Program

How do you tell someone’s story? What is it like to hear your story told by another? How do you turn a long recorded interview into a short, compelling audio piece? We will discuss those questions and more as we hear stories from our community created by students in Cornell’s Milstein Program in Technology & Humanity. The students crafted these pieces as part of a class taught by Milstein Program Director Austin Bunn, a filmmaker, writer, and theater artist. Lesley Greene and Jonathan Miller, co-directors of Story House Ithaca, helped connect the students to community groups and advised them as they prepared and crafted their stories. The students interviewed English language learners from Open Doors English, participants in Civic Ensemble’s ReEntry Theater, and members of Lifelong Senior Center. cWe will hear a sampling of these audio stories, with time for discussion of each. Austin, Lesley, Jonathan, Milstein students, members of the three community groups, and you, the audience, will take part!

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6:00pm to 7:00pm: Reading: Collective Monstrosities in the Poetry of Emilia Ayarza de Herrera

This bi-lingual two-voice reading with Erin Riddle and Juliana torres Forero will be the product of a collaborative translation from Spanish to English of some of Bogotana poet Emilia Ayarza’s most portentous poems. The reading will be preceded by some reflections on the context in which Ayarza wrote, the particular traits of her work, and its relevance to the past and present. Ayarza was a poet ahead of her time and named the realities of the most vulnerable and silenced humans and other living beings of her society: women of diverse races, the proletarian class, children, people with physical disabilities, queer individuals, and nature. Immersed in a social, cultural, and political landscape marked by violence and social and gender inequalities, the irreverent nature of her poems appears as oxygen in times of oppression and uncertainty. Our reading seeks to embody Ayarza’s poetry, to bring it to the present, and, in a performative way, to emulate the monstrous force of her voice.

REGISTER to get the Zoom link for this event. (Note: The Zoom link you receive when you register will only work for you. Please don’t share it. Instead, share the registration link! Thanks!)