Want a way to support KPFA without any funds going to Pacifica? Proceeds of KPFA’s local events go solely to KPFA. Check out this list of upcoming KPFA benefit events (and important co-sponsored events) – we’ll see you there!
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EVE ENSLER
IN THE BODY OF THE WORLD: A Memoir
Hosted by Erica Bridgeman
Monday, May 20, 7:30 pm
First Congregational Church, 2501 Harrison @ 27th Street, Oakland
Even though Eve Ensler has devoted her life to the female body—how to talk about it, how to protect and value it—she has spent much of her life disassociated from her own body. This disconnection was brought on by her father’s sexual abuse and her mother’s remoteness. “Because I did not, could not inhabit my body or the Earth,” she writes, “I could not feel or know their pain.”
But Eve is shocked out of her distance. While working in the Congo, she is shattered by her encounter with the horrific rape and violence inflicted on the women there. Soon after, she is diagnosed with uterine cancer, and through months of harrowing treatment she is forced to become first and foremost a body – pricked, punctured, cut, scanned. It is then that all the distance is erased. As she connects her own illness to the devastation of the Earth, her life force to the resilience of humanity, she is finally, fully – and gratefully – joined to the body of the world.
Internationally renowned playwright, activist and author (The Vagina Monologues and I Am an Emotional Creature, among other works) Ensler is the founder of V-Day, the global movement to end violence against women and girls, which has raised over $90 million for local groups and activists.
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An Evening with EDUARDO GALEANO
“Children of the Days: A Calendar of Human History”
Hosted by Miguel Guerrero
Tuesday, May 21, 7:30 pm
First Congregational Church of Oakland
2501 Harrison Street at 27th St., Oakland
Eduardo Galeano is the world-renowned Uruguayan author of the Memory of Fire Trilogy, The Book of Embraces, and many other masterworks. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez gave his Open Veins of Latin America to President Obama when they first met, sending the book overnight to #2 on Amazon’s bestseller list.
One of Latin America’s most distinguished writers, journalists and historians, Eduardo Galeano is the author of the Memory of Fire Trilogy, Open Veins of Latin America, Days and Nights of Love and War, Walking Words, Soccer in Sun and Shadow, The Book of Embraces, Mirrors, and many other works. Born in Montevideo in
1940, Galeano lived in exile in Argentina and Spain for many years before returningto Uruguay. His work has inspired popular and classical music composers from allover the world. He was the recipient of the first Lannan Prize for Cultural Freedom,the Casa de las Americas Prize, and the First Distinguished Citizen of the region
by the countries of Mercosur. His admirers include Isabel Allende, Gabriel GarciaMarquez, Subcomandante Marcos, Howard Zinn, Naomi Klein, and of course HugoChavez. Eduardo is a man of truly progressive principles and pure literary duende.
Galeano’s new work unfurls like a medieval book of days. Each page has anilluminating story that takes inspiration from that day of the calendar year. Each entry resurrects the heroes and heroines who have fallen off the historical map. Beautifully translated by Galeano’s longtime collaborator, Mark Fried, Children of the Days is a great humanist treasure that shows us how to live and how to remember.
Co-Sponsored by: Global Exchange, KPOO – Pájaro Latinoamericano, La Peña Cultural Center, Mission Cultural Center and Radio Bilingüe.
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KPFA Radio & La Peña Cultural Center present:
NANCY MOREJON
Fresh from Cuba, the celebrated poet and public intellectual, Presented by AL YOUNG, California Poet Laureate emeritus, novelist, essayist & Kathleen Weaver, poet, biographer, translator
Thursday, June 13, 7:30 pm
La Peña Cultural Center, 3105 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, CA
$10 advance tickets, $12 door: www.Lapena.org
Nancy Morejón is the best known and most widely translated woman poet of postrevolutionary Cuba. Born in 1944 in Havana to a militant dock worker and a tradeunionist seamstress, Morejón graduated from Havana University, where she majored in French. She was Cuba’s first black woman poet to be internationally acclaimed as a poet. Her distinctive poetry is shaped by an Afro-Cuban sensibility and an eloquent concern for Cuban nationhood, cultural fusion, and the rights of women. She has published more than twenty volumes of poetry, as well as critical works and translations from French and English. Her works in English translation include Looking Within / Mirar adentro, Selected Poems 1954-2000, Where the Island Sleeps Like a Wing, translated by U.S. poet Kathleen Weaver, and With Eyes and Soul/Images of Cuba with photographs by Milton Rogovin. For many years, Morejon served on the editorial staff of UNEAC (Union of Cuban Writers and Artists). Currently she is president of the Cuban Writers’ Union, UNEAC, and an advisor at Casa de las Americas in Havana.
Morejón has won Cuba’s prestigious National Literary Award, the National Prize for Poetry, and the National Award in Criticism – as well as many international awards, including the Latin American Studies Association Cuba Prize. Thoroughly bilingual, she has read and lectured at universities in the U.S. She served as writer in residence at Wellesley College and conducted a two-day symposium on her work at the University of Missouri in Columbia. Howard University Press has published a collection of critical texts on her work: Singular Like a Bird: The Art of Nancy Morejon.
AL YOUNG is a distinguished writer, poet, fiction writer, anthologist, and educator. His many honors include Poet Laureate of California, the PEN-Library of Congress Award for Short Fiction, the PEN-USA Award for Non-Fiction, two American Book Awards, and the Richard Wright Award for Excellence in Literature. His writings have been translated into many languages, including Russian, and Urdu. His works in fiction include Seduction by Light and Sitting Pretty; in poetry, Something About the Blues, and Coastal Nights and Inland Afternoons: Poems 2001-2006.
In the 1970’s Young wrote film scripts for producer Joseph Strick, Sidney Poitier, Bill Cosby, and Richard Pryor. In the 1980’s and 90’s, as a cultural ambassador for the United States Information Agency, he traveled throughout South Asia, Egypt, Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian West Bank. In 2001 he traveled to the Persian Gulf to lecture on American and African American literature and culture in Kuwait and in Bahrain for the U.S. Department of State. Subsequent lecture tours have taken him to Southern Italy in 2004, and back to India in 2005.. Blending story, recitation and song, Young often performs live with musicians. In 2005, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger appointed him Poet Laureate of California.
Kathleen Weaver is a poet, author of Peruvian Rebel, the Life and Work of Magda Portal, co-editor of The Penguin Book of Womens’ Poetry and The Other Voice, translator of Nancy Morejón, Julio Cortazar, Omar Cabezas and many others.
NOTE: Nancy Morejon and Kathleen Weaver will also be appearing on Sunday, June 9, in San Francisco at the Emerald Tablet.
