In the latest issue of Buffalo Spree, Maria Scrivani chats with Min Jin Lee about Pachinko, her writing heroes, and her next book. Come be inspired by one of today's best loved authors on March 20th!
Meet Writing Center Youth Ambassador Sage Enderton. The first picture is from 2014, when she first started coming to the center. And here's Sage this past week, leading a poetry and collage workshop as a Teaching Artist! She's the first young writer to become a Teaching Artist and we couldn't be more proud of her. Watching her change from being too shy to share her work to realizing that "I have a voice and it's loud and it's powerful and I have a lot to say" has been an honor and a privilege. For the workshop, Sage explored the idea of collage in poetry and visual art. Participants wrote centos* and then created collages inspired by their poems. *From the Latin word for “patchwork," the cento (or collage poem) is a poetic form made up of lines from poems by other poets.Thank you for supporting the Just Buffalo Writing Center; this transformation wouldn't have been possible without you.
Education Director Noah Falck was able to sneak back into town before the storm. He spent a few days at the NYSCA offices for a conversation on professional development opportunities for arts educators. It is always a great occasion to meet our colleagues at other organizations; we're all stronger together! back row:Elizabeth Bennett of Staten Island ArtsEd Friedman & Maura O'Malley of Lifetime Arts, Inc.Helaya de Barros of Association of Teaching ArtistsStephen Butler of CNY ArtsBryant 'Drew' Andrews of Center for Creative EducationAlex Sarian of Lincoln Center EducationRosemary Williams of Western New York Book Arts CenterNoah Falck of Just Buffalo Literary CenterAnnette Ramos of The Rochester Latino Theatre Company- RLTCNelle Stockes of Magic Box Productions front row (kneeling / sitting)Katie Rainey of Community-Word ProjectSusan Perlstein of Elders Share the ArtsChristine Leahy & Kavie Barnes of NYSCA
The first days of January tempt us to pivot between past and future. As we begin to come back to our routines and think about where we want to go to, we also pause to recall where we’ve been. At the end of 2018 we lost Amos Oz. Thankfully, WBFO took the time to sit down with him in 2011 when Oz was a guest at BABEL.
A Recipe For Horror STEP ONE: Everyone writes the title of horror movie that doesn’t exist. You’ll Need Your Rubber Gloves In 1922, on a lonely hike to a waterfall, William Kobialski encountered a carefully woven basket.
Arriving in Buffalo, Hamid said, felt in a way like coming home. Upon taking the stage he made note of the parallels between Buffalo and his native Lahore, cities whose best days are thought to be behind them and yet suddenly seem to have more to look forward to than others proclaimed. From the beginning, Hamid established himself as a “familiar stranger”, and the rest of his talk he spent telling that we all share that identity. For almost two hours, Hamid engaged the audience with anecdotes of his own personal history, the rationale behind the use of portals in his novel, the portals we use in real life, and the commitment to the use of imagination in adult life.
It may have been Annette Daniel Taylor’s booming voice introducing poets coming up to the mic, it may have been the warm red light shining on Julian Montague’s mural (painted by James Moffit), or it may have been the ephemeral poems from Adam Drury’s POEMATIC 900, but if you walked by Washington St. on October 11th, you definitely witnessed some type of magic that transformed an early fall Thursday.
Whoever said memes can’t be art doesn’t have a sense of humor, or of art for that matter--and they definitely haven’t met Travis Sharp. That idea was one of the jumping-off points at the Drawing Words & Writing Visual Texts workshop he ran at the Just Buffalo Writing Center in early October. Sharp, a PhD student in the Poetics program at SUNY Buffalo, centered the first day of workshop around the visual and physical structure of letters and words.
