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Calling all Boston writing enthusiasts, activists, residents, entrepreneurs, local groups and networks, non-profit organizations, professionals, scholars and youth, please join us for a unique kick-off mixer to connect the Boston’s writing community, celebrate the power of words, explore why and how they write, and recognize their ability to rewrite, re-envision, or radically transform the world with stroke of a pen or the tap of a key. This week of programming celebrates the power of words to reimagine our shared social world. We are particularly eager to reflect on the capacity of our collective imagining to rupture fossilized, harmful structures and institutional categories. In the words of Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison, “Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.” How can our linguistic practice enact anti-violent, anti-racist, and anti-discriminatory actions? Can we use language in expansive ways that increase our knowledge of each other and establish more just social organizations? These are some of the questions that we will address.

The panel will feature guest speakers Danielle Legros George, Jennifer De Leon, Melissa Pearson, Ryan Cordello, Payal Kumar, Daniel Callahan, and Porsha Olayiwola, and will be moderated by Associate Teaching Professor of Writing at Northeastern University and Director of the NU Writing Center, Isabel Sobral Campos.

The winner of the Poems of Roxbury Contest led by the inaugural Roxbury Poetry Festival will kick-off their winning poem at the Mixer.

About the moderator:

Isabel Sobral Campos is an Associate Teaching Professor of Writing at Northeastern University and Director of the NU Writing Center. She is the co-founder of the Sputnik & Fizzle publishing series and editor of the anthology Ecopoetics and the Global Landscape: Critical Essays (Lexington Books, 2019). Her scholarly work has appeared in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and EnvironmentThe Emily Dickinson JournalThe Quarterly Review of Film and VideoEvental Aestheticssymplokē, and elsewhere. She is the author of the poetry collections How to Make Words of Rubble (Blue Figure Press, 2020), Your Person Doesn’t Belong to You (VA press, 2018) as well as three chapbooks. Her poems have appeared in a number of literary journals and anthologies, including the Boston ReviewBrooklyn RailBAX 2018: Best American Experimental Writing (Wesleyan University Press, 2018), and Dispatches from the Poetry Wars: Poetics for the More-Than-Human World (Spuyten Duyvil, 2020). Her collaborative translation of Salette Tavares’ Lex Icon is forthcoming with Ugly Duckling Presse.

About the panelists:

Danielle Legros George is a writer, translator, academic, and author of several books of poetry including The Dear Remote Nearness of You, winner of the New England Poetry Club’s Sheila Margaret Motten book prize. She is a professor in and director of the Lesley University MFA program in Creative Writing, and taught in the Joiner Institute for the Study of War and Social Consequences Writer’s Workshop, at the University of Massachusetts, Boston for more than a decade. Her awards include fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Boston Foundation, and the Black Metropolis Research Consortium. The Massachusetts Artists Leaders Coalition recognized her civic work with a Champion of Artists Award in 2017. She was appointed the second Poet Laureate of the city of Boston, serving in the role from 2015 to 2019. Her most recent work is a book of translations from the French, Island Heart: The Poems of Ida Faubert, published by Subpress Collective in 2021.

Jennifer De Leon is the author of Don’t Ask Me Where I’m From (Atheneum/Simon & Schuster, 2020) and the editor of Wise Latinas (University of Nebraska Press, 2014). An Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Framingham State University and a faculty member in the MFA in Creative Nonfiction program at Bay Path University, she has published prose in dozens of literary journals and is a GrubStreet instructor and board member. Her essay collection, White Space: Essays on Culture, Race, & Writing, is the recipient of the Juniper Prize and published by UMass Press (2021). Learn more about her work at: www.jenniferdeleonauthor.com 

Dr. Melissa Pearson is a Teaching Professor in the Writing Program-English department at Northeastern University.  For more than 20 years, Pearson’s research and teaching has been grounded in Racial Literacy and Concepts of Social Justice, and in African American, primarily Black Feminist Rhetoric. 

Ryan Costello is an organizer with the United Front Against Displacement and a co-editor of the Urban Core newsletter. He organizes against gentrification in the Boston area (with a specific focus in the South End and Lower Roxbury). As an author, he focuses on writing about and for ongoing political struggles, such as the struggle against the privatization of public housing, and related efforts to stop rent increases across the area. His writing works to situate ongoing people's movements in a larger historical context, and to emphasize the need and basis for a broad-based opposition to gentrification and similar oppressive and racist developments in the city and across the country.

payal kumar is a diasporic dreamer working towards inclusive solidarity and liberation based on Wampanoag territory. As a multimedia artist, doula, medical advocate, and futurism fanatic, they invoke the power of interdisciplinary movement-building to construct tender new possibilities of being beyond borders and capital. They have performed spoken word and facilitated imaginative workshops in different spaces across the country - from open mics and protests, to national conferences like the Allied Media Conference, to gallery spaces like the Museum of Fine Arts. Through creative strategies, they cultivate playful intergenerational dialogues challenging us to blur the boundaries between body and time-space so we can all fully activate our collective power. Currently, they manage the Gender Affirming Care program at the Planned Parenthood League of MA, are on the board of Subcontinental Drift Boston, and are active with various transnational grassroots organizations.

Daniel Callahan is multimedia artist, filmmaker and designer. His work merges various disciplines including but not limited to sound, video, painting, collage, photography, and performance to create immersive experiences that seek to transcend medium and bridge the gap between the mundane and metaphysical. His directorial debut “Come On In” is a feature-length psychological drama film which he wrote, co-produced and stars. Daniel is a graduate of the Pennsylvania School of Design, where he received the Fine Arts Chair Award, and Emerson College where he received his Masters in Fine Arts in Film and Video. His work has been exhibited in the Museum of Fine Arts, The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and the Institute of Contemporary Art and has been featured in such publications as Believer MagazineThe Bay State Banner, and Words Beats & Life: The Global Journal of Hip-Hop Culture. He is a recipient of the Donor Circle for the Arts Grant and the NEFA creative city grant, as well as the newly elected president of the Roxbury Cultural District.

Porsha Olayiwola is a native of Chicago who now resides in Boston. Olayiwola is a writer, performer, educator and curator who uses afro-futurism and surrealism to examine historical and current issues in the Black, woman, and queer diasporas. She is an Individual World Poetry Slam Champion and the artistic director at MassLEAP, a literary youth organization. Olayiwola is an MFA Candidate at Emerson College. Porsha Olayiwola is the author of i shimmer sometimes, too with Button Poetry and is the current poet laureate for the city of Boston.

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