“it is better to speak...” – An experiential workshop and conversation rooted in Audre Lorde’s Berlin years

10am - 11:30am: it is better to speak poetry "practice" - an experiential workshop exploring disrupted silences through Lorde's influence in Germany with Precious Chika Musa

11:30am - 12:30pm: A Conversation and Q&A with Afro-German activist and scholar Dr. Marion Kraft

You can RSVP for:

• to actively participate in the entire workshop (10am-12:30pm)
• to attend just the conversation with Dr. Marion Kraft in person (11:30am-12:30pm)
• to listen to the conversation with Dr. Marion Kraft online via Teams Webinar link (11:30am-12:30pm)

RSVP  HERE.

A Black feminist poetry workshop modeled after Audre Lorde’s poem and grounded in her time in Berlin with Precious Musa

"it is better to speak..." is a Black feminist poetry workshop modeled after Audre Lorde’s poem “A Litany for Survival” and grounded in her travels to and teachings in Berlin, Germany. As a Black lesbian feminist poet, warrior, and mother, Audre Lorde crafted a global exchange of ideas, love, and survival strategies in service to individual and collective liberation. A few questions sit at the center of this gathering: what does it look like to survive* together? What might we learn from those whose backgrounds and contexts differ from our own, but whose freedom is linked to ours? How might our differences complement our livelihoods? For Lorde, poetry becomes a serious site of possibility, a way for all people, and Black women in particular, to know themselves and each other. Poetry–as written word and embodied practice–is capable of creating and sustaining alternate realities. 

The workshop is designed to offer participants wisdom from Audre Lorde’s life practice, while troubling the notion that silence—within ourselves and between each other—equals safety, equals survival. The workshop will begin with teaching, writing and sharing, then lead into a facilitated (and virtual) conversation with guest speaker Dr. Marion Kraft: an Afro-German contemporary and friend of Lorde’s, who translated her poems into German. If you are curious about Lorde’s Black feminist blueprint, global impact, the innate power of your own experience and voice, come. This program is led by Precious Chika Musa and presented in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut Boston and Just-Bookish. 

* Lorde thought differently about survival, saying: "By survival I do not mean mere existence, which is the province of the walking wounded and the walking dead, but an active quality of living" (qtd. in Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde by Alexis Pauline Gumbs).  

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