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Asheville Wordfest
Asheville Wordfest contextualizes an intercultural poetry festival as journalism. By presenting diversity in the line-up, we draw diversity in audience. An outreach project of The Mountain Area Information Network, a non-profit media network, in Asheville, NC, we take down the wall between literature and life, art and reality, and pull everything together. Asheville Wordfest will present a panel at AWP in Chicago. Poetry for Asheville Wordfest is news of the world we live in. Woven into this perspective is Asheville Worfest’s drive to bring together poets from diverse cultural, aesthetic, historical, and physical contexts. In 2009 we will present: Li-Young Lee, the son of Chine emigrants escaping the Cultural Revolution: Valzhnya Mort of Minsk, who writes in Belarusian at a time when the language is almost extinct under Soviet influence: Ekiwah Adler-Belendez, who from the confines of cerebral palsy embraces life of the spirit in words; Frank X Walker whose work Affrilachia created a movement of identity for African Americans living in the mountain South; Elizabeth Bradfield whose poems engage the tensions between outward perception and experience as these forces shape how we study nature and judge one another; and many more poets, including an array of talented local poets, including Gary Copeland Lilly and Holly Iglesias. With the support of the North Carolina Arts Council, the North Carolina Humanities Council, the Asheville Area Arts Council, UNCA, Warren Wilson College, The Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center, Book Works, Grateful Steps Publishing, Inc, Malaprops Bookstore/Café, and Jubilee!, we look forward to presenting Asheville Wordfest in 2009. Asheville Wordfest is part of The Mountain Area Information Network’s Community Voices citizens journalism project, and as such we invite the community to contribute its voice through donations and volunteer support. As a community-based poetry festival, Asheville Wordfest invites you to help build it. There are many ways to help. Volunteering time and energy is priceless to us. We also invite you to Sponsor a Poet by donating money for a poet’s meals, lodging and travel. Please find a copy of our Sponsor-a-Poet offering, which allows you to choose how you wish to help. Despite all the generous grants we are still in need of APPROXIMATELY $10,000.00. We believe in the power of community to help. The poets for Wordfest 2009 are: Quincy Troupe, Li-Young Lee, Valzhnya Mort, Liz Bradfield, Frank X Walker, Lee Ann Brown, Holly Iglesias, Ekiwah Adler-Belendez, Pat Riviere-Seel, Ross Gay, Patrick Rosal, doris davenport, Gary Copeland Lilley, Caroline Mercurio, Debora Kingsland Foerst Join us in Asheville, NC, April 30-May 3. This is free to the public.
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