United Against Silence

Jon Sands is a winner of the 2018 National Poetry Series, selected for his second book, It’s Not Magic (Beacon Press, 2019). He hosts an interview series on IG Live called Ps & Qs. You can follow him at @iAmJonSands. His work has been featured in the New York Times, as well as anthologized in The Best American Poetry. He teaches at Brooklyn College, Urban Word NYC, and for over a decade has facilitated a weekly writing workshop for adults at Baily House, an HIV/AIDS service center in East Harlem. He tours extensively as a poet, but lives in Brooklyn.

Laura Van Prooyen is author of three collections of poetry: Frances of the Wider Field (Lily Poetry Review Books) Our House Was on Fire (Ashland Poetry Press) nominated by Philip Levine and winner of the McGovern Prize and Inkblot and Altar (Pecan Grove Press). She is also co-author with Gretchen Bernabei of Text Structures from Poetry, a book of writing lessons for educators of grades 4-12 (Corwin Literacy). Van Prooyen is the Managing Editor for The Cortland Review, and she teaches in the low-residency MFA Creative Writing program at Miami University. She lives in San Antonio, TX. www.lauravanprooyen.com

Brionne Janae is a poet and teaching artist living in Brooklyn. They are the author of Blessed are the Peacemakers (2021) which won the 2020 Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize, and After Jubilee (2017) published by Boat Press. Brionne has received fellowships to Cave Canem, Sewanee Writers Conference, Vermont Studio Center and Hedgebrook. Their poetry has been published in Ploughshares, The American Poetry Review, The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, The Sun Magazine, jubilat, and Waxwing among others. Off the page they go by Breezy.

Singer-songwriter, Poet, Actress, 2x New York Times Best Selling Author + Mental Health Expert

Jewel went from a girl who grew up with no running water on an Alaskan homestead, to a homeless teenager in San Diego, to an award winning, Multi-Platinum Recording Artist who released one of the best-selling debuts of all time.

Through her career Jewel has sold over 30 million albums worldwide, earned 26 Music Award nominations, including The Grammys, American Music Awards, MTV Awards, VH1 Awards, Billboard Music Awards, and Country Music Awards, winning 8 times. Jewel has been featured on the cover of TIME Magazine, Rolling Stone, performed on Saturday Night Live, at the Super Bowl, the NBA Finals, for The Pope and The President Of The United States. She has experimented with several genres over her career with top hits in Folk, Pop, Club, Country, Standards, Children’s and Holiday music.

Visit www.cbaw.org for more information.

Brandon Wint is an Ontario born poet and spoken word artist who uses poetry to attend to the joy and devastation and inequity   associated with this era of human and ecological history. Increasingly, his work on the page and in performance casts a tender but robust attention toward the movements and impacts of colonial, capitalist logic, and how they might be undone. In this way, Brandon Wint is devoted to a poetics of world making, world altering and world breaking.    For Brandon, the written and spoken word is a tool for examining and enacting his sense of justice, and imagining less violence futures for himself and the world he has inherited. For more than a decade, Brandon has been a sought-after, touring performer, and has presented his work in the United States, Australia, Lithuania, Latvia, and Jamaica. His poems and essays have been published in national anthologies, including The Great Black North: Contemporary African-Canadian Poetry (Frontenac House, 2013) and Black Writers Matter (University of Regina Press, 2019). Divine Animal is his debut book of poetry.

Aracelis Girmay is the author of the poetry collections Teeth, Kingdom Animalia, and the black maria. She is also the author/collagist of the picture book changing, changing, and with her sister collaborated on the recently published What Do You Know? Girmay is on the editorial board of the African Poetry Book Fund and recently curated How to Carry Water: Selected Poems of Lucille Clifton.

A 2019 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow, Dare Williams is a Queer HIV-positive poet, artist, rooted in Southern California. He has received fellowships from John Ashbury Home School and The Frost Place. He is a co-producer of the reading series Word of Mouth which raises money for communities facing food and nutrition inequities. Dare’s poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net and a two-time finalist for Blood Orange Review’s contest. His work has been anthologized in Redshift 5 by Arroyo Secco press and is featured in Cultural Weekly, Bending Genres, THRUSH, Exposition Review, and is forthcoming in Limp Wrist and elsewhere.

For more information on programs visit www.cbaw.org.

Sonya Huber is the author of six books, including the award-winning essay collection on chronic pain, Pain Woman Takes Your Keys and Other Essays from a Nervous System and the forthcoming Supremely Tiny Acts: A Memoir in a Day. Her other books include Opa Nobody, Cover Me: A Health Insurance Memoir, and The Backwards Research Guide for Writers. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, and other outlets. She teaches at Fairfield University and in the Fairfield low-residency MFA program.

Ekaterina started her art journey at The School of Fine Arts in Yaroslavl, Russia, where she completed a rigorous fine arts program. With a solid knowledge of skills and techniques she received a scholarship at The Art School of Museum of Tel-Aviv. There she experimented with different shapes and forms while starting to develop her own style of painting. Ekaterina continued her art education through self-study with various mediums before beginning to focus on using her art to bring awareness for the conservation of wildlife.

The intention behind the Animalize project is to reconnect people with nature and wildlife. We have become so focused on our daily experiences that we have lost touch with what lies beyond our urban lifestyles. This has led to a lack of awareness on how our actions affect the environment and wildlife. Animalize reminds us of nature’s brimming beauty, presence and need for care.

Ekaterina’s goal is to bring love for wildlife back into people’s hearts.  Through the connections they feel when they gaze into the animals’ eyes, she intends to awaken the viewer to his or her impact on animals. She hopes to inspire each person to look deeply into their current practices and question how they affect the environment and animals. With her paintbrushes in hand, she paints colors of awareness and consideration for wildlife.

Former guest Nisha Gupta returns to interview Seema Reza about her creative process and relationship to silence. 

Seema Reza is a writer and performer and the author of the memoir When the World Breaks Open (Red Hen Press) and the poetry collection A Constellation of Half-Lives, (Write Bloody Publishing). An alumnus of Goddard College and VONA, her writing has appeared on-line and in print in McSweeney’s, The Washington Post, The LA Review, The Feminist Wire, HerKind, The Offing, and Entropy among others, and case studies on her work have appeared in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Related Diseases in Combat Veterans. She has performed and lectured at universities, festivals, correctional facilities and theaters across the country, including Columbia University, The Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, and the Near Future Conference.

Based outside of Washington DC she is the CEO of Community Building Art Works, an organization that encourages the use of the arts as a tool for narration, self-care and socialization among a military population struggling with emotional and physical injuries. In 2015 she was awarded the Col John Gioia Patriot Award by USO of Metropolitan Washington-Baltimore for her work with service members. In 2018, the HBO Documentary “We Are Not Done Yet” featured Reza’s work. She has taught poetry in classrooms, jails, hospitals, and universities.