Lifelines: The Poetry of Human Rights at CSW60

A CSW60 parallel event

Event Details

  • Time

    10:30am

  • Date

    19 Mar, 2016

  • Location

    • Church Center for the United Nations, 2nd Floor
    • 777 United Nations Plaza New York, NY 10017
  • Contact

    WLP

Abena Busia

Professor Abena P.A. Busia (Ghana/USA), Chair of the Department of Women's and Gender Studies, is also a member of the English faculty and on the Executive Board of the Center for African Studies at Rutgers University.

Evie Shockley

Author of several collections of poetry, including a half-red sea (2006) and the new black (2011). Shockley’s honors include the Holmes National Poetry Prize and fellowships from Cave Canem, the Millay Colony for the Arts, and the American Council of Learned Societies.

Darrel Holnes

Darrel is a Zell Postgraduate Fellow, Zell Poetry Award Winner, and National Endowment for the Arts Resident at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts.

Sara Goudarzi

Sara's non-fiction, poetry and translations have appeared in Scientific American, National Geographic News, The Christian Science Monitor, and CNN.com. She is the author of Amazing Animals, teaches writing at NYU, and is at work on a first novel.

Robert Gibbons

Robert is author of Close to the Tree and other poetry collections, and was 2013 Brooklyn Poets “Poet of the Week.”

Elizabeth Lara

Elizabeth is co-editor of Happiness, The Delight-Tree: An Anthology of Contemporary International Poetry, and 2011 Millay Colony Artist-in-Residence

"You always have to have the poets, because they will always be the first to speak the truth." 

- Poet Lissa Piercy, September 2015 Lifelines Panel

Lifelines are voices cast across divides to convey understanding and appreciation for the pain of exile, torture, violence and war, and the possibility of starting afresh, of healing, safety, and peace. We invite you to experience these powerful readings and performances by poet activists facilitated by acclaimed Ghanaian-American poet and scholar Abena Busia.

Abena Busia, Robert Gibbons, Sara Goudarzi, Darrel Holnes, Elizabeth Lara and Evie Shockley will inspire the crowd at a parallel event of the 60th Session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) with poems on freedom, war, coups, conquests, family, love, memory and the craft of writing.

First launched in 2000, Lifelines uses the transformative power of art to bring about social and political change.

Watch: Lifelines 2016: The Poetry of Women's Human Rights

View event photos 

This CSW60 Parallel Event is sponsored by Women's Learning Partnership, Black Lives Matter, and the African Women's Development Fund – USA.

We believe that poetry is the life blood of how we can live ethical lives. And, we are poets who bear witness and that witnessing is a witness to the complexities of our lives--both private and public.

,AMBASSADOR AND PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH

2016 Lifelines flyer
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