Look and Listen #35: Deeyah Khan via TEDx
Today’s focus is on the work of Norwegian born Deeyah Khan, and shows how the empathy behind her filmmaking is rooted in her own story. She is famous for Banaz: …
Look and Listen #34: Titus Underwood, Nashville Symphony
Titus Underwood is the Principal Oboe for the Nashville Symphony. You might assume that, as an artist with a highly educated and elite ensemble like a symphony, he wouldn’t encounter …
Look and Listen #25: Colored Hearts
This short romantic film directed and written by Robin K. Johnson, who also stars, is a look at the voices that nag those in interracial relationships. Why do we celebrate …
Look and Listen #13: Emi Mahmoud, How to Translate a Joke from Button Poetry
“How to Translate a Joke” is a perceptive poem about how humor and comedy can be a vehicle for prejudice and a means of enforcing the status quo. The remarkable …
Look and Listen #12: Maya Angelou, We Wear the Mask
In honor of Juneteenth, Maya Angelou’s poem, “We Wear the Mask.” She was a masterful reader, dancing on the edge of emotion. May we all learn how to listen and …
Look and Listen #7: The Ayes Have It, Savanah Leaf/Tiana Clark
This beautiful, elegiac short film by Savanah Leaf is a video poem. “The Ayes Have It” was written by Tiana Clark and speaks about being a mixed race woman in …
Quote for Today: Elizabeth Alexander
It’s a fact: black people in this country die more easily, at all ages, across genders. Look at how young black men die, and how middle-aged black men drop …
40 days of poetry: Day 20: To a Dancer by Katherine McDaniel
40 days of poetry: Day 20: To a Dancer by Katherine McDaniel. This is a poem that I wrote a few years ago. It seems all the more pertinent now …
Quote for Today: Téa Obreht
When your fight has purpose–to free you from something, to interfere on the behalf of an innocent–it has a hope of finality. When the fight is about unraveling–when it is …
Quote for Today: Marie-Louise Sjoestedt
The inscriptions (mere names or epithets of divinities) and the monuments (in so far as they are purely Celtic, for we must reckon with the possibility of Roman influence) give …