What a Word is Worth

Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond has written for AOL, Parenting Magazine, the Village Voice, Metro, and Trace Magazine. Her short story “Bush Girl” was published in the May 2008 issues of African Writing and her poem, “The Whinings of a Seven Sister Cum Laude Graduate Working Board as an Assistant,” was published in 2006’s Growing up Girl Anthology. A cum laude graduate of Vassar College, she attended secondary school in Ghana, Powder Necklace is loosely based on that experience. She is the author of the children's story: Blue: A HISTORY OF THE COLOR AS DEEP AS THE SEA AND AS WIDE AS THE SKY.

Stephanie Fetta holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Irvine. Her monograph Shaming into Brown: Somatic Transactions of Race in Latina/o Literature (The Ohio State University Press, 2018) uncovers a new analytical lens Dr. Fetta identifies as the soma, loosely defined as the gestural body. Portrayer of our momentary and deeper subjectivities, the soma is also a central actor in social relations and a primary communicator of our ideological investments. Professor Fetta argues the soma is a pivotal site for unraveling bodily social technologies we use to create and sustain social subjugation. Specifically, she argues our somas efficaciously shame one another into intersectionally racialized stratifications.  In a hemispheric study, Professor Fetta's current research considers possible forms of latinidad south, north, and within the US border. She studies Mexican indigenous poetry of the Oaxaca diaspora in Southern California in relation to and against articulations of US latinidad. North of the US border, Dr. Fetta considers connections and dissonances between Canadian creative expression and US Latin@/x literature. She argues the promise and the limitations of an emerging sense of continental latinidad.  Professor Fetta is the editor of The Chicana/Latina Literary Prize: An Anthology of Prize-Winning Fiction, Poetry, and Drama, and is considered the foremost authority on the work the influential Chicano poet Andrés Montoya, winner of the Before Columbus American Book Award. She will co-edit a 2020 special edition of the Notre Dame Review on Montoya's legacy. Dr. Fetta has published with Routledge Press, Chicana/Latina Studies journal, and Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, among others.  PUBLICATIONS  Shaming into Brown: Somatic Analysis and Latina/o Literature. The Ohio State University Press. Monograph. October 2018.  "Dying Softly to His Song: Poetics of Love and Dissolution in Andrés Montoya's A Jury of Trees." Critical Introduction. Jury of Trees: Posthumous Poetry Collection of Andrés Montoya. Editor Daniel Chacón. Tempe, AZ: Bilingual Review Press, Arizona State University, 2017. 19-29. Invited introduction.  Co-editor of Notre Dame Review. Special Section on the Legacy of Andrés Montoya. Spring 2020.  "A Bad Attitude and A Bad Stomach: The Soma in Oscar ‘Zeta’ Acosta’s The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo.” Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production in the Luso-Hispanic World 6:1 (2016): 88-109. Peer-reviewed article.  “Teaching the Work of Andrés Montoya” in Latino/a Literature in the Classroom: Twenty-First-Century Approaches to Teaching. Routledge Press, 2015. Pp. 287-90. Invited contributor. Book chapter.  “Disability, Domestic Workers and Disappearance in Octavio Solís’s Lydia.” Chicana/Latina Studies Journal. Spring Issue 4:2 (2015): 26-57. Peer-reviewed article. Nominated for Best Essay of 2015 by Latino Studies Forum, Latin American Studies Association.  Review of Transnational Borderlands in Women’s Global Networks: The Making of Cultural Resistance. Editors Clara Román-Odio and Marta Sierra. Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures 66: 4 (2012): 224-225. Invited review.  “How Does an Other Write anOther? The Filipino in Alfredo Véa’s The Silver Cloud Café" in One World Periphery Reads the Other: Knowing the Oriental in the Americas and the Iberian Peninsula. Editor Ignacio López-Calvo. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010. 282-296. Book chapter.  The Chicano/Latino Literary Prize: An Anthology of Prize-Winning Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. Houston: Arte Público Press, 2008. Invited editor and author of introduction. Book.

Mark Matousek is an award-winning author of seven books, Sex Death Enlightenment: A True Story, The Boy He Left Behind, When You’re Falling, Dive, Ethical Wisdom: The Search for a Moral Life, Ethical Wisdom for Friends, Mother of the Unseen World, and Writing To Awaken: A Journey of Truth, Transformation, and Self-Discovery. His work has appeared in numerous anthologies and publications, including The New Yorker, O: The Oprah Magazine, Details, Tricycle, Good Housekeeping, and Harper’s Bazaar. He blogs regularly for Psychology Today and offers courses in creativity and spiritual growth around the world using the Writing To Awaken method.

Danielle Legros Georges is a professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Lesley University. She is also the former Poet Laureate of the City of Boston, where she was tasked with raising the status of poetry in the everyday consciousness of Bostonians, acting as an advocate for poetry, language and the arts, and creating a unique artistic legacy through public readings and civic events.

Books

Island Heart: The Poems of Ida Faubert, a book of English translations from the French (Subpress Collective, 2021)

City of Notions:  An Anthology of Contemporary Boston Poems, editor (Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture, City of Boston, 2017)

Letters from Congo, a chapbook of poems (Central Square Press, 2017)

The Dear Remote Nearness of You, a book of poems (Barrow Street Press, 2016)

Maroon, a book of poems (Curbstone Press, an imprint of Northwestern University Press, 2001)

Médar Serrata (Santo Domingo, 1964) Poeta y ensayista residente en Estados Unidos. Doctor en Literatura Hispánica de la Universidad de Texas en Austin. Profesor de literatura en Grand Valley State University, Michigan, y autor de los poemarios Las piedras del ábaco (Colección Egro de Poesía,1986) y Rapsodia para tontos (LibrUsa 1999). Sus textos han sido recogidos en diversas antologías; su libro La poética del trujillismo: Épica y romance en el discurso de “La Era” (Isla Negra Editores, 2016) recibió el Premio Anual de Ensayo Pedro Henríquez Ureña.

Carlos Ulises Decena is an interdisciplinary scholar, whose work straddles the humanities and social sciences and whose intellectual projects blur the boundaries among critical ethnic, queer and feminist studies, social justice and public health. His areas of interest include critical theory as well as social and cultural analysis, with a particular emphasis on transnationalism and diaspora in the American continent, US Latinoamerica and the Caribbean. His first book, Tacit Subjects: Belonging and Same-Sex Desire among Dominican Immigrant Men, was published by Duke University Press in 2011. He is currently at work on Circuits of the Sacred, a project that articulates Latin@, queer, and Afro-diasporic theologies in the service of a non-denominational, sex and body-affirmative notion of the divine for queers of color.

Gregg Westwood is a spiritual risk-taker committed to manifesting the most authentic expression of his soul on this planet and supporting others in discovering their soul’s unique creative expression by transforming their fears and challenges into flow, love, and joy.  A former professional dancer, actor, and massage therapist, he honors the wisdom of the body and the healing power of creative expression. Gregg’s practice is called Depth Integration. He has led workshops across the country with "AIDS, Medicine and Miracles'' and the Association for Experiential Education, to name a few.  He coaches private clients in Denver, CO and in several countries online.  He is the host of the Healing Trauma through Conscious Embodiment Summits online and the creator of “The Inner Journey Series” workshops and retreats and the “Relax, Release and Restore” and “Remembering Who you Truly Are” online courses.  Gregg has been called a renaissance man and his unique work is an expression of his depth, studies, talents and his strong desire to contribute to the emotional and spiritual well-being of his clients, so that together we may create a better world.

Dr. Harrell is a licensed psychologist with areas of specialization in multicultural and community psychology. Her research interests include cultural dimensions of wellness and positive well-being, racism-related stress, resilience-oriented stress management interventions, culturally-diverse contemplative practices, humanistic-existential and integrative approaches to psychotherapy, and African American mental health. Her current research focuses on the development of stress management and strengths-based interventions with diverse populations in community and clinical settings. Dr. Harrell has published in the areas of racism and mental health, race and clinical supervision, cultural issues in positive psychology, interventions with African Americans, psychospiritual principles for working with African American women, and therapeutic journaling. She is a frequent presenter and invited speaker at national conferences and serves as a consultant to educational and community organizations on cultural diversity.

Listen to my conversation with the authors of Fighting Time. Dr. Amy Banks, a Harvard-trained psychiatrist, and founding member of the Relational Cultural Theory (RTC) model, truly walks her talk in this book. Issac Knapper, the head trainer of the Crescent City Boxing Gym in New Orleans, embodies, no doubt, love, and compassion of the purest kind. Take a listen. 

Durante muchos años, Irka Mateo ha estado investigando las raíces de la música dominicana. Viajó durante diez años (1997-2007) por las zonas rurales de la República Dominicana documentando más de trece géneros de tradiciones musicales folclóricas, desconocidos en la cultura dominicana más amplia y más allá, y creando un archivo de música folclórica dominicana. Durante este tiempo, introdujo el acordeón en la escena alternativa dominicana/latina, sacó a la luz la 'Comarca', un género totalmente desconocido fuera del campo, y fue la primera mujer en tocar percusión tradicional en entornos urbanos. En este episodio hablamos del pensamiento descolonizado y otros puntos de interés. 

Prof. García Peña is the author of The Borders of Dominicanidad: Race, Nations and Archives of Contradictions (Duke University Press, 2016) a study of the impact of stories — historical and fictional — on the national and racial identity of a people. Offering the Dominican experience as case study, this book shows how the stories of a nation create marginality through acts of exclusion. These exclusionary acts are linked to the tensions between colonial desire and the aspiration for political independence. The book also shows how these official stories of exclusion, though influential in shaping a country’s identity, are always contested, negotiated, and even redefined through acts of resistance linked to the tensions between history — what is perceived as evidence of fact — and fiction — what is presumed to be invention: cultural productions, oral histories, and rumors. The Borders of Dominicanidad is the winner of Winner of the 2017 National Women’s Studies Association Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize, the  2016 LASA Latino/a Studies Book Award and the 2016 Isis Duarte Book Prize in Haiti and Dominican Studies.

Fatima Portorreal Liriano. Antropóloga, especialista en estudios de género y desarrollo. Profesora de INTEC. 

Ann Filemyr, Ph.D. is the fourth President of Southwestern College following four and a half years of service as the Vice President of Academic Affairs and Dean. She also serves as the Director of the Ecotherapy Certificate.

Rei Berroa. Poeta y catedrático (George Mason University). Autor de más de 50 libros (versos, antologías y crítica). Premio Internacional Trieste Poesía por el conjunto de su obra (2010) y Premio Mihai Eminescu (Rumanía, 2012). Le fue dedicada la VIII Feria del Libro de Nueva York. Ha sido traducido a más de 15 lenguas. Coordina anualmente el Maratón de Poesía del Teatro de la Luna, del cual ha publicado 14 antologías. El pasado 21 de marzo co-coordinó el Festival Mundial del Día de la Poesía: 24 horas de lecturas ininterrumpidas de poemas con poetas de todo el mundo.

Laurie Amodeo, MBA, RYT is a singer-lyricist, yoga teacher and activist, founder of the BIPOC Meditation Collective in Boulder, Colorado. 

Poeta y narrador chileno residente en los Estados Unidos. 

Anthony Peterson has studied, taught, and written about cultural and racial realities for more than 30 years. I discovered him through one of his Tedtalks and was so impressed by his words that I conquered my shyness and contacted him; my gesture was met with utmost kindness and openness. 

Since 2004, he has designed and facilitated diversity workshops in corporate, academic, and community settings.Anthony’s diversity discussions took a personal turn in 2014 when he began documenting conversations with his white grandchildren regarding race. He hopes that those conversations serve as an invitation for others to tell their own racial stories.

Sherry Reiter, Ph.D., LCSW, PTR-M/S, RDT-BCT, Registered Poetry Therapist/Mentor-Supervisor (PTR-M/S) and Registered Drama Therapist/ Board Certified Trainer (RDT-BCT), is an international speaker and author of Writing Away the Demons: Stories of Creative Coping Through Transformative Writing (North Star Press, 2009). As director of The Creative Righting Center, Dr. Reiter mentors helping professionals here and abroad. She created Poets-Behind Bars. Dr. Reiter is a three-time national award winner for her visionary work in bibliotherapy and was chosen as Teacher of the Year for Touro College in 2009.

In this conversation Francisco Palmieri, shares his experience advocating for human rights, diplomacy, sovereignty and much more.  Francisco (Paco) Palmieri is the Acting Assistant Secretary in the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, where he previously served as Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary from January 2016 to January 2017. Mr. Palmieri served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Central America and the Caribbean from January 2014 to January 2016. From 2012 to 2014, Mr. Palmieri served as Deputy Executive Secretary in the Executive Secretariat. He served as the Director of the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs’ Office of Policy, Planning, and Coordination. He also served in the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Spain, and Honduras. He led the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement’s (INL) Latin American and Caribbean Programs Office. He was the Director of Embassy Baghdad’s INL Office from 2010-2011. He also served as Director of the Near East and South and Central Asia Office in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL).

En la historia de la literatura dominicana corresponde a la Generación de Posguerra. Es el primer dominicano egresado en Administración Cultural. Estudió en el Centro Latinoamericano y del Caribe para el Desarrollo Cultural. Licenciado en Derecho, Magna Cum Laude, con un diplomado en Derecho de Autor y Propiedad Intelectual y otro en Negocios Jurídicos Internacionales. Posee un Máster en Filosofía del Mundo Global por la Universidad del País Vasco.

In this conversation we discussed somatic language, anti-racism, and other important topics.  Francesca Maximé is a Haitian-Dominican Italian-American somatic psychotherapist, life coach, and embodied antiracism educator in New York. She’s also an award-winning poet and author, former television journalist, and host of the ReRooted podcast on the Be Here Now Network. She sees adults, couples, and families virtually around the world to support emergence and wellbeing. You can learn more about Francesca at www.maximeclarity.com

Dr. Maureen Walker, is a great mind of our times who has been advocating for anti-racist, feminist rights. We talk about the codified language that sustains racism, about the black and brown body's constriction in white spaces, and about how we code-switch to protect ourselves. She also talks about how we can lean on each other to become fully human.  

A necessary conversation. Please help the cause by sharing it. 

Jamie Figueroa, a Boricua sister, self-described as Afro-Taína by way of Ohio. She is the author of the critically acclaimed novel Brother, Sister, Mother, Explorer, a powerful statement on recovering from colonialism and other isms, in my view. Jamie is a longtime resident of northern New Mexico. Her writing has appeared in American Short Fiction, Emergence Magazine, Elle, McSweeney's, and Agni, among others. She received a Truman Capote Award and was a Bread Loaf Scholar. Criticism of her work has appeared in the New York Times and other venues. Jamie received an MFA in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts. 

John F.Evans, MAT, MA, Ed.D is a writing clinician and integrative health coach who works with groups, individuals, and health care professionals, including physicians, nurses, therapists, counselors, psychologists, social workers, educators, personal coaches, and alternative health care practitioners, teaching them how to use writing for better physical, emotional, and spiritual health. Evans is founder and executive director of Wellness & Writing Connections, LLC and provides individual, group, and institutional life course guidance programs. Evans co-authored Expressive Writing:Words that Heal with James Pennebaker. His book, Wellness & Writing Connections: Writing for Better Physical, Mental, and Spiritual Health, is a collection of essays from the Wellness & Writing Connections Conference Series.

An episode with Monique Lang, a psychotherapist, teacher, writer and healer. For over 40 years she has worked with and helped individuals, groups and communities to find healing. Trained in Internal Family Systems, Past Life Regression, EMDR, Gestalt, Psychoanalysis, Comprehensive Resource Model, Reiki, mindfulness practices and shamanic techniques, Monique brings a depth of presence and gentleness to her work with people in her counseling practice, her teaching, her writing and as leader of workshops and Journeys to visit and learn from Indigenous Healers.

 Dr. David Kopacz is a psychiatrist at the Seattle Veterans Affairs primary care clinic. He is an education champion with the National VA Office of Patient Centered Care & Cultural Transformation, where he teaches Whole Health to VA Staff across the USA. He is board certified in psychiatry and holistic & Integrative medicine and is an assistant professor at the University of Washington.  He has always been interested in whole-person, holistic treatments and delivery systems, and has traveled to different parts of the world in the pursue of knowledge and the offering of services. He worked for three years in New Zealand tending to indigenous population. Dr. Kopacz is the author of: Re-humanizing Medicine: A Holistic Framework for Transforming Your Self, Your Practice, and the Culture of Medicine, and Walking the Medicine Wheel: Healing Trauma & PTSD, Becoming Medicine: Pathways of Initiation into a Living Spirituality, and Becoming Who we Are: Beautiful Painted Arrow’s Lessons for Children ages 10-100, with co-author Joseph Rael (Beautiful Painted Arrow).

Patricia Dunn is the author of Last Stop on the 6 (Bordighera Press, 2021) a novel that depicts the lives of Italian-Americans in the Bronx in the 1980s. Patricia Dunn is the author of the young adult novel Rebels by Accident (Sourcebooks Fire). Her writing has appeared on Salon, in The Village Voice, The Nation, LA Weekly, The Christian Science Monitor; in the anthology Love, InshAllah: The Secret Love Lives of American Muslim Women (Soft Skull); and elsewhere.

To learn more about her work, please visit her site: 

https://www.patriciadunnauthor.com

This episode is a lively conversation with poet and professor Dr. Alexandria Peary. Here is more about our guest: 

Alexandria Peary (MFA, MFA, PhD) serves as New Hampshire Poet Laureate. She is the author of nine books, including Control Bird Alt Delete, Prolific Moment: Theory and Practice of Mindfulness for Writing, and Battle of Silicon Valley at Daybreak. The recipient of a 2020 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship, her work has received the Iowa Poetry Prize; Best of NH (for inspiring artist); several Pushcart and Best of the Net nominations; and Notable Essay in Best American Nonfiction. She specializes in mindful writing and gives talks and workshops on the topic, including a webcast for National Novel Writing Month; a TEDx talk, “How Mindfulness Can Transform the Way You Write”; and the 2021 keynote for the Secondary School Writing Centers Association. Alexandria is the architect and host of the popular webinar on mindful writing for the National Council of Teachers of English.

This is a brief introduction to our podcast series on collective healing through creative means.