Event Description:
Join BlackFemaleProject, Dr. Sheryl E. Davis, and Dr. Gale Jackson during Black Caucus weekend in Washington, DC for a soulful breakfast, conversation, and writer’s workshop. Together, we’ll explore the long legacy of storytelling traditions across the African diaspora and the power of poetry and storytelling as healing practices for Black women. Full of inspiration, guests will then have the opportunity to reflect and write on their own experiences.
About the Workshop:
Black Loom, Legacy, and Futurity: Telling Our Her Stories
We will be expanding our circles of con-versation with an offering of movement, song, poetry, and story, in homage to the living legacy of early African and African diaspora women and an invitation to the gathering to share some of their own stories in creative communal expression.
About Our Facilitator:
Poet, writer, storyteller, cultural historian, interdisciplinary artist, scholar, and educator, Gale P. Jackson works within a lineage of African diaspora griot traditions, engaging in quest and questions of language and art making, story and journey, history and memory, performance, imagination, and the creation of sites for community cultivation and social transformation.
Gale is the author of Mi Mu I/Ken I See You Friend: A Gathering of Greetings (Forthcoming); Put Your Hands on Your Hips and Act Like a Woman: Song, Dance, Black History and Poetics in Performance (UNP, 2024); MeDea A Novella (Glad Day, 2023); Suite for Mozambique (Ikon, 2003); Bridge Suite: Narrative Poems Based on the Lives of African and African American Women in the Early History of These New Black Nations; and A Khoisan Tale of Beginnings and Ends (Storm Imprints, 1998), edited the collection Collaborative Voice: Art in a War Time, and co-edited Art Against Apartheid: Voices for Freedom. Her work has been performed, exhibited, presented and anthologized widely in publications including The African American Review; Freedomways; The Journal of Black Studies; American Voices; Callaloo; Tribes; Artist and Influence, Ploughshares, and Essence, and she is currently a contributing writer to The A-Line.
In her long course of study in learning and teaching, Gale has worked, in conversation and collaboration, with a radiant circle of artists, educators, older and younger co-learners. She has facilitated the Ehecatl Olin Learning Studio and The Poet in the House Collaborative, with New York City Public school students, and (in one of her favorite job titles!) served as “librarian and storyteller” in residence at the independent school Hayground. Over the last twenty years, Gale has also served as Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts and Education on the MFA and EDU graduate faculties at Goddard College and she has been awarded an Eccoles Visiting Scholar and an NEH fellowship for her work in griot traditions, art and education.
Free with registration. One registration per person.