Here, a few of NYWC’s dedicated workshop leaders and participants discuss the work, share their writing, and remind us of the importance of bringing voice to the voiceless in New York City.

Special thanks to Louise Crawford, Erick Fix, and Marian Fontana for their hard work in making this video happen, as well as to all the writers and workshop leaders who appeared in the film. Enjoy!

NYWC is proud to present Michael Cirelli, Angel Nafis, and Jon Sands: three poets who inspire us. We love them for their poetic bravery and innovation, their dedication to community and honest dialogue, and just being damn fine human beings! Join us on Saturday, May 18 at Urban Folk Gallery (101 Smith Street, Brooklyn) for the third leg of BKLYN LitCrawl 2013.  

Hosted by NYWC Executive Director Aaron Zimmerman. Poets hit the stage at 7:15 p.m.

ABOUT THE POETS

Michael Cirelli is the author of four collections of poetry, two books of curricula, and his work can be found in The Best American Poetry, World Literature Today, and on the HBO series Def Poetry and Brave New Voices. He is the Executive Director of Urban Word NYC, the founder of Urban Word Los Angeles, and he teaches courses and directs critical literacy conferences at New York University, the University of Wisconsin, and Michigan State University. He is currently working on a collection of short stories entitled The Pure Land. 

Angel Nafis  is from Ann Arbor, MI  and is a Cave Canem Fellow. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including FOUND Magazine’s Requiem for a Paper Bag, Decibels, The Rattling Wall,Union Station Magazine, GirlSpeak Webzine. She has participated in Women of the World Poetry Slam and the National Poetry Slam and is an Urban Word NYC Mentor. Angel lives in Brooklyn and founded the quarterly Greenlight Bookstore Poetry Salon Reading Series. She also eats insane amounts of dark chocolate + sea salt, hides out in her room making mobiles for grown folks, and listens to the same Prince song over and over. Check out Angel’s Tumblr here.

Jon Sands wrote The New Clean (2011, Write Bloody Publishing), and starred in the award winning web-series “Verse: A Murder Mystery” from Rattapallax Films. He is an adjunct with the City University of New York, a Youth Mentor with Urban Word-NYC and heads two separate writing programs for Bailey House in Harlem (an HIV/AIDS service center). His work is published or forthcoming in Rattle, The Millions, Word Riot, Muzzle, Union Station, The Rattling Wall from PEN Center USA, and others. He is a member of the groundbreaking live literature tours, “The Whirlwind Company” and “The SpillJoy Ensemble.” He lives in Brooklyn. Say yes to www.jonsands.com.

Praised as a “fuse lighter” by author Julia Cameron and “the wisest teacher of writing I know” by the celebrated writing guru Peter Elbow, Pat Schneider has lived a life of writing and teaching, passion and compassion.

NY Writers Coalition owes a lot to Schneider — our workshop method and the spirit of all the work we do. She was instrumental in the creation of NYWC, as well as  the Women of Color Writers Workshop & Community  and hundreds of other writing groups around the world. So, it’s with great pleasure that we invite you to join us in celebration of her most recent work, How the Light Gets In: Writing as a Spiritual Practice.

With How the Light Gets In, she delves beyond the typical how-to of writing to gracefully guide readers through the artistic and spiritual questions that life offers to everyone.

Please join NYWC and the Women of Color Writers’Workshop on Friday, May 17 @ 7:30 p.m. at Greenlight Bookstore (686 Fulton Street, Brooklyn) for a reading and signing with Pat Schneider, followed by a wine and cheese reception. Click here for directions and RSVP here.

Just in time for spring, Dig Deep, NY Writers Coalition’s online journal, is back! This quarter’s issue showcases prose and poetry in a variety of voices on topics of  memory, love, family, and new beginnings. We hope you enjoy reading them as much as we enjoyed watching them evolve through the writing process.

This issue, we’ll dig deep with poet Arisa White in a stirring craft essay about finding the voice of her characters and how she ensures those voices remain authentic in her writing, with artwork contributed by Zoe Frederick. Contributing workshops include 14th Street Y, 80 Arts, College & Community Fellowship, Isabella Geriatric Center, and the Osborne Association.

Start reading here!

Reflecting the rich diversity of New York City, Write Makes Might features a myriad of writers from NYWC workshops with previously untapped talent: immigrants, at-risk teens, retired adults, the formerly incarcerated, the homeless, the disabled, survivors of serious illness, and many others.

This year’s reading takes place at the Andrew Heiskell Library (40 W 20th Street, Manhattan). Light refreshments will be served. Click here for directions.

By Anne Mule

My name is Owen Marshall and I am a Golden Doodle. My mommy is a Golden Retriever- so sweet and gentle, and my daddy is a Standard Poodle, very mischievous and smart. Some days I feel very frisky and am inclined to get in trouble- it’s the poodle in me. Sometimes I’m very laid back and friendly- it’s the Golden Retriever in me. When taken out for a walk twice a day, everybody fusses over me and tells me how beautiful I am. I find it rather tiresome, but I try to be polite and I know I’m gorgeous. I think if my mommy person really, really loved me, she’d take off my leash in Central Park any time of the day. Then, I could run around like the maniac I am and jump in the Bethesda Fountain for as long and as much as I like. Oh well, I do love my mommy person and want to keep her happy with me so I do my best to be obedient, BUT it’s far from easy though!!!

Best Regards,
Owen Marshall
11/9/2012

By Donald Lortie

Most of us probably don’t dwell on the topic of the earth speeding through space, but it’s one of the things brought to my attention in an astronomy class in college over 50 years ago. Let’s examine some of the facts.

First of all the earth is spinning (rotating on its axis) at over 1000 miles per hour. You can figure that out when you realize that it takes 24 hours. But that doesn’t affect the path of the earth through space. It affects the path people move through space within the system—an interesting point that most people don’t think about. The earth is also moving around the sun to make a year; that speed is over 67,000 miles per hour and over 200 million miles in a year. Multiply that by your age to see how far you have traveled. Next the earth is situated toward the outer edge of the Milky Way Galaxy which is also rotating or spinning, but the galaxy itself is moving through space because everything is moving away from everything else in the universe according to the idea of the expanding universe. This leads me to think that the earth and its people may be moving through space in sort of a bumpy corkscrew fashion—the people on it moving more erratically because of rotation of the earth, but that may not be the end of it because the universe itself may be moving relative to other universes according to the multiverse (multiple universes) theory. So the earth is sitting inside a system of other rotating bodies moving in a complex fashion impossible to visualize and at speeds impossible to comprehend.

Consider the speed of light, more than 186,000 miles per second. That’s more than 7 times around the world in one second. At that speed light from the edges of the universe has been racing toward us for 13.7 billion years which is considered the age of the universe. If there is anything out there beyond that, we can’t see it because the light hasn’t reached us yet. At this point my head is spinning. How about yours? Light from the sun takes about 8 minutes to get here.

The facts I have stated I remember from my astronomy class, but I added the multiverse theory. In those days that theory wouldn’t have been accepted. Another theory I have become interested in recently is the Electric Universe theory which contradicts current generally accepted theories of the universe. It substitutes electrical forces and plasma physics as the major forces in the universe instead of gravitational forces holding all bodies in the universe in place. Perhaps it is a combination of both forces.

Writing about space in the universe (macro world) makes me think about space in the micro world: our bodies are mostly space, solid objects are mostly space, atoms are mostly space. To give you an idea of how much space consider the following fact: A few teaspoons of the nucleus of a neutron star would weigh about a billion tons. Why? Because the space is gone. The atoms are crushed together so much that the nuclei of all the atoms touch each other—no space, no electrons, jut a very dense material.
I hope you enjoy the material in these short paragraphs. I hope the material isn’t too dense. I hope this material doesn’t blow your mind or make your head spin. If you want more, watch Cosmos by Carl Sagan or other stories about the universe on Netflix.

By Louise Alexander

Cali adopted me. She was a calico cat that hung out on the hedges of my walkway up to the steps of my house and began to come out as I’d come home from work, come out from under the hedge bush and greet me with a look of “hello” and then a quick retreat beneath the bushes. Finally, one day when I left a window near my driveway open, the calico cat jumped in and we began a series of getting to know each other. She was very intelligent. She used to challenge me on who’d get down the stairs first from my upstairs bedroom by letting me in the morning start down and then she’d jump off the bed, run like mad and beat me down the stairs. One day she stayed out three days. I worried and prayed. Then on the fourth day of her absence, I saw her at the top of my driveway, escorted home by two mangy cats one on each side of Cali who then left them and ran down the driveway and leaped up into my first floor window. I was so happy to see her home. As time went by but not too long like maybe a month or so-Cali became listless, then anorexic and uninterested. Worried, I took her to the Animal Medical Center and visited her every day. The doctor said she had feline Aids. It cost me a grand- I had to put her to sleep- I cried and she consoled me somehow, somehow she consoled me. Those mangy cat boyfriends gave Cali AIDS!