Workshop and Poetry Reading, March 30 and 31

The Division of Humanities is sponsoring a writing workshop and poetry reading March 30 and 31.  Guest writer Yael Flusberg will lead a Freewriting Workshop entitled “Writing from the Well Within” on Tuesday, March 30, from 5:30 to 6:30 pm,  in the Jane Bancroft Cook Library, room 248.  On Wednesday, March 31, Flusberg will give a poetry reading from 7:00 to 8:30 pm in College Hall.  Refreshments will be provided.  Both events are free and open to the public.

Yael Flusberg is a writer and community activist. She has two decades of experience facilitating organizational change with local, national, and international social justice and philanthropic organizations and their leaders. She has taught writing, yoga, and the two practices combined, at libraries, schools, universities, hospitals, yoga studios and festivals. A certified yoga teacher and a Reiki Master-in-training, Yael holds a master’s in International Development Management from American University. She lives in the Ella Jo Baker Intentional Community Cooperative for Activists in Washington, DC.

Her poetry, memoiristic essays and reviews have been anthologized in America! What’s My Name, DC Poets Against the War: An Anthology and Travelers’ Tales. Her writing has appeared in many magazines and journals, including Gargoyle, Lilith, Potomac Review and Sojourners. Her radio essays have been broadcast on Washington, DC’s local NPR station. Yael is a member of the Macondo Writers Workshop, founded by Sandra Cisneros, and she has twice served as poet-in-residence at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. Read more about Yael’s writing and work at www.Yelements.com.

In 1999, Yael co-founded the DC-based arts organization Sol & Soul, which nurtures and promotes emerging and seasoned artists of conscience. She is a founding board member of Clancy Works, a dance company that emphasizes community engagement, and serves on the Boards of Directors for Split This Rock Poetry of Witness Festival, the International Summer Program on the Holocaust, and Teachers for a Better Belize.

Yael says of her work:

I began writing as a way of unraveling the story – and the legacy – of my working-class, immigrant family. I was born in 1968, a tumultuous year of assassinations, social unrest, and escalating war, to older working-class Jews from Eastern Europe. My parents survived persecution and genocide in their countries of birth, and suffered severe trauma and debilitating mental and physical illness in the United States. They were frequently hospitalized and institutionalized from the time I was born until they both died, my mother of suicide, when I was in my early teens. Their stories, their tragic lives, and their early deaths were all rich fodder for the process of transformation. Writing their stories and my own; contextualizing them within a larger socio-political, psychological and historical framework; and using literary tools such as image, metaphor and archetypes; ultimately helped me transcend the limits of my own story.

For more information, please contact New College Writer-in-Residence Wendy Call at [email protected].