Author Archives: Christina

Carol Hebald publishes new chapbook of poems, Colloquy

CAROL HEBALD Postcard(FRONT&BACK)

In these poems Carol Hebald’s “Colloquy” with the too-soon-departed father glitters with a honed craft as she poignantly grapples with a universe of personal emblems and elemental memories, invoking the natural world and conflicted love. For example, as she reports in these evocative lines from “In Memoriam”:
I feel your absence
more than I miss your presence.
Where you went I never knew.
The key my memory left with you
is underneath the snow…
Oh my father, I call your name
but cannot speak your name.
—Hugh Seidman, author of: Somebody Stand Up and Sing (from New Issues Press 2005)

Carol Hebald’s new collection Colloquy is an extraordinary achievement. It’s a dialogue between a young woman and her father, who died when she was a young child. Their voices, his imagined from beyond the grave, merge on and off through this lyric meditation. Even though the poems are connected, each poem is self-contained and remarkable, and many individual poems contain the full drama of the whole. Whether in the first or third person, an intimacy is experienced throughout. “How passionately we spoke, how well!” she says to her father, and this is so true of the poetry on every page.
—Barry Wallenstein, author of DRASTIC DISLOCATIONS, New & Selected Poems (NYQ Books).

Rivers of soft rain and storms of hot blood run through Carol Hebald’s new and most impassioned collection of poems. COLLOQUY is a beautifully crafted work of yearning memory that explores the dark worlds of temptation, seduction, and abuse, and the final journey to forgiveness and light in the history of a daughter’s and father’s love.

—Martin Tucker, author of PLENTY OF EXITS, and Editor-Emeritus of CONFRONTATION Magazine.

Westbeth video artist Maya Ciarrocchi
in NY Times article about
“Telephone” art exhibit/

Maya Ciarrocchi TELEPHONE

Sometime last winter, Terri St.Arnauld and Frank Yezer, photographers in Austin, Tex., and Maya Ciarrocchi, a video artist in New York, each received an email that contained a song. The tune was by Stelth Ulvang, a musician from Denver, whom they had never met. In a spare recording, on banjo and accordion, Mr. Ulvang sang of a forlorn man and a landscape of smoke and clouds.

All three recipients got down to work, poring over the lyrics, “trying to understand what the artist was conveying,” Ms. St.Arnauld said. Their goal was to make something inspired by the song, and to connect in a mysterious creative experiment.

Read more about the project here:
NY Times article

Lilly Rivlin film “Esther Broner: A Weave of Women” featured at Grace Paley Symposium at New School on April 9, 2015

Lilly Rivlin GracePaley Schedule

In 1975 Esther Broner and Naomi Nimrod wrote the first Women’s Haggadah, paving the way for modern Jewish feminism. For the next 36 years, Esther Broner led the Feminist Passover Seder in New York City, with a core group of women. This film documents the evolution of Jewish feminism through archival footage and interviews with leading Jewish feminists. At the same time it tells the story of Esther Broner, described by the New York Times as a writer who explored the double marginalization of being Jewish and female. Without her, we can assume, modern Jewish women might not have found a worthy place in the home, in society, and in Jewish tradition.

More info about the film: www.estherbronerthefilm.com

More info about symposium:

Council Member Corey Johnson visits Westbeth.

Left to right: Mae Gamble, RogerBraimon, Christina Maile, Marta Almirall Morales, Corey Johnson, Pawnee Sills, Geo Cominskie, Halina Warren. photo: Tequila Minsky

Left to right: Mae Gamble, RogerBraimon, Christina Maile, Marta Almirall Morales, Corey Johnson, Pawnee Sills, Geo Cominskie, Halina Warren. photo: Tequila Minsky

In a wide-ranging Villager article, editor Lincoln Anderson talks to Corey Johnson about his work in pursuing affordable housing, his fight for contextual zoning, and his commitment to finding ways to ease income inequality in NYC.

Included in the article are the issues raised in a short but intense meeting, Corey Johnson held with Westbeth tenants recently where tenants discussed the Board’s refusal to disclose documents relating to Westbeth finances, and warehousing of apartments.

Johnson said, he’s incensed at what’s going on at the Westbeth artists’ housing complex, where the board of directors has sued to stop the residents from getting access to public records from the state Attorney General’s Office.

“The corporation and the board at Westbeth should stop hiding the documents and be transparent,” Johnson stated. “And they should stop warehousing apartments and start occupying them with artists who need affordable housing.

Read the full Villager article here.
http://thevillager.com/2015/03/26/pushing-for-rent-rollback-johnson-rolls-into-year-2/

Carole Byard ‘s Rent Series is subject of a discussion at the Schomburg Center Thursday March 12 at 6:30PM.

KMBT_C364e-20150202125823

The Schomburg Center for Research into Black Culture celebrates the work of visual artist, Carol Byard, with a conversation addressing the “Rent Series”. The program will center on Byard’s discovery–after her father’s death–of a cache of rent receipts he’d kept in his life-long efforts to provide housing for their family, always struggling to do so. In the early 1980s, Byard set about to reimagine her father efforts in a series of images which she titled “Rent.” Join Byard’s peers for a conversation and showcase of her work. Guest speakers include, Grace Williams, Tomie Arai, and Eve Sandler.

For further info: Schomburg Center for Research into Black Culture

For an interview with Alexis de Veaux about Carol Byard’s work and the Rent series: http://www.nypl.org/blog/2015/02/19/carole-byards-rent-series

Photo credit: Artwork from Carole Byard’s “Rent Series,” courtesy of Alexis De Veaux