Tuesday February 26 7:30 p.m.
The Mill Gallery, 131-B Front Street, Santa Cruz
$5-$10 sliding-scale donation (no one turned away for lack of funds)
A celebration of the life and work of poet and short story writer Grace Paley will be held on Tuesday February 26, at 7:30 p.m. at the Mill Gallery, 131-B Front Street in downtown Santa Cruz. The event, hosted by the Resource Center for Nonviolence, will include film of Paley reading her poetry and a collage of photos from her life. Poems and excerpts from her short stories and essays will be read by an assortment of local poets, writers, activists, feminists, pacifists, anarchists, and other rascals, including Julie Olsen Edwards, Ellen Bass, Morton Marcus, Darrell Darling, Betsy Fairbanks, Cappy Israel, Bill Monning, Barbara Hayes, Richard Moss, Shannon Spencer, Merrie Schaller, Lynn Zachreson, Nick Zachreson, Marion Vittitow, and Lee Swenson, Cofounder and Codirector of the Institute for the Study of Cultural and Natural Resources in Berkeley.
$5-$20 suggested sliding-scale donation (no one turned away for lack of funds). Donations beyond costs of producing the event will be divided between Grace’s favorite nonprofit, the national War Resisters League and the Institute for the Study of Cultural and Natural Resources, a cosponsor of the event. For more information, contact www.rcnv.org or 831-423-1626.
Additional info:
Grace Paley was one of America's great writers, steeped in traditions of community, social activism and the struggle for transformation,
Grace Paley, who died August 22, 2007, was most famously a writer of short stories. But folks at the Resource Center for Nonviolence knew her as a political activist, friend, ally and supporter who spoke at the Center's Annual Dinner and Program in 1987. Grace Paley was, according to the LA Times, "an acclaimed writer and activist who in only three collections of short stories gave earthy voice to the interior life of the Bronx Everywoman." Grace's three collections of short stories, again according to the LA Times, "won her critical acclaim and the prestigious Rea Award for short-story writing. But Paley, known as a passionate activist for causes ranging from the Vietnam War to feminism to the Iraq War, was perhaps less prolific for those efforts - a diversity of experience she embraced in a June interview, saying, 'It's not as if anybody is one thing.'"
A descendant of the East European Jewish socialist tradition, who came to her own as a writer in the tumultuous 1960s, Grace embodied good humor, imagination, working with other people, radical politics, and a dogged persistence -- all necessary ingredient for times such as those in which we live.
|