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This
year, after several years in the Jane's Stories Press Foundation Writer's Cooperative, I became President of the Board of
Directors. Not as big a deal as you might think; Jane runs very much on consensus and collaboration. The thing I like most
about Jane women is that we work hard and play equally hard, with plenty of food and drink to lubricate the process, and that
we actively seek out writers of diverse cultures for our publications and readings.
http://www.janesstories.org
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| L to R: Jan Kent, Shobha Sharma, Me, Linda Mowry |
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Meeting with my Jane's Stories Press Foundation colleagues. We have such fun working, it's
more like play.
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This photo is here so you can join me in congratulating my friend Ann Jackson Rainey on passing the Illinois real
etsate exam. Ann is the mother of my goddaughter, Mariah.
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You can drop me a line at my email address by clicking anywhere in this sentence.
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This fall my new chapbook was published. Called Sa-co-ni-ge/Blue Smoke, it contains poems about or inspired by the Southern
Appalachian mountains, where I was raised, and by the Cherokee/Tsalagi, and their influence on my family and mountain culture.
Thus, the title: Sa-co-ni-ge (Blue)/Blue Smoke. I would have liked to have the entire title mirrored in Tsalagi and English,
but the Tsalagi word for smoke is tsugasvsdi––I didn't think it was fair to make
bookstores spell that! Above is Bull Mountain, near a friend's house northeast of Asheville, NC.
In 2005 I wrote and received a grant from Jane's Stories to work with young people on making a video, complete from script
to editing, on the civil rights movement in St. Augustine. I also wrote and received a grant from the Florida Humanities Council
to gather more history on the Lincolnville area of St. Augustine, one of the oldest areas of African-American settlement in
the U.S. This year, the Somebody Started Singing film is being shown in St. Augustine schools, and the photography collection
we gathered for the Roots & Flowers Project has been shown in libraries, schools, and other institutions all over the
county. Here, Jakila Perkins learns to videotape from Kathe O'Donnelly for the young people's film.
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