October 24–25, 2008 The Joy of Text Festival
All free and open to the public
Friday October 24, 2008 6-9pm
at Heights Arts Studio at the library:
6-9pm Joy of Text Opening Reception
Abecedarium
Alphabets by members of ABC, Art Books Cleveland
Selection of work from fall classes
Artist Book Sale
7:30 pm Take Nine Poets
Bonnie Jacobson, Katie Daely, Gail Bellamy, Cindy Washabaugh, Darlene Montonaro, Kathleen Cerveny, Linda Robiner, Rita Grabowski, Meredith Holmes.
Saturday October 25, 2008
at Heights Arts Studio at the library:
10 am - 5 pm Artist Book Sale
2 pm Footnotes on the History of Text
A live multi-media performance presents The Joy of Text papyrus to pixels
3pm Haiku Death Match
You decide who wins! Listen to last year's haiku death match here.
Each year HeightsArts facilitates a search for a Poet Laureate for Cleveland Heights, Ohio. The Laureate is appointed annually by Cleveland Heights City Council during April, National Poetry Month. The principal official duty of the Laureate is to write and present poems for 12 public events during the term of office - about once a month.
...more about Requirements and Application Process.
Heights Arts and Bottom Dog Press publish Cleveland Heights Poet Laureate Anthology.
Heights Arts and Bottom Dog Press are pleased to announce the collaborative publication of Awake at the End: A Heights Arts Poet Laureate Anthology featuring poems by the first three poet laureates of Cleveland Heights: Meredith Holmes (2005), Loren Weiss (2006), and Mary E. Weems (2007-2008).
Edited by John Panza and Mary E. Weems, Awake at the End serves as both a poet laureate primer and a fine collection of poems by the Cleveland Heights Poet Laureates who found themselves awakened by their tenures as poet laureate.
Local poet and educator Ray McNiece says of Awake at the End, “This anthology shows just how poetry can matter—for a community, from a community and by a community.”Amy Bracken Sparks says the poems in Awake at the End are “a conflation of histories, memories, and narratives whose edges are ever changing.”
And Plain Dealer Friday magazine editor Laura DeMarco says, “Awake at the End is a wonderful reminder of the impressive talent that calls the Heights home.”
cover art by Cleveland painter Timothy Callaghan, photographs by Herb Ascherman, Jr., cover design by JoAnn Dickey
To order a copy ($14 + tax) call 216-371-3457 or e-mail register@heightsarts.org Copies can be picked up at Heights Arts Gallery.
Cleveland Heights Poet Laureate project is mentioned in the Washington Post.
On April 7, 2008 at 7:30 pm Cleveland Heights City Council will reappoint Mary Weems as the 2008 Cleveland Heights Poet Laureate at the recommendation of Heights Writes, the poet laureate selection committee convened by Heights Arts.
The committee has recommended that the poet laureate term be extended to two years going forward so that poets can more deeply infuse poetry into the community. In her first term, Weems introduced the Found Poetry project to encourage people to discover both each other and poetry through creating a poem together.
Weems will read Opening the Lines of Communication, a Found Poem that she created based on a project at Heights Arts Studio last summer. Artist Migiwa Orimo from Yellow Springs, Ohio, was an Ohio Arts Council artist-in-residence at the Studio and formed a summer collective around the theme Community as a Form of Art. One of the projects was a large, artist-drawn map of Cleveland Heights zoning parcels. People were encouraged to put a red dot on the map and record on a slip of paper something about that place that was meaningful to them, prompted by This is where……. Weems’ poem is based on these slips of paper, and she said that in reading these sentences she truly felt a sense of community for the first time since she had moved to the city.
Mary Weems is a seasoned poet, performer, and educator. She respects the value of poetry as a fundamental art form, and brings copious experience as a public speaker and a deep appreciation of the role of the poet in the community to her tenure as Poet Laureate. Heights Arts welcomes her strong presence and impressive credentials as Dr. Weems begins her second term as the third Poet Laureate of Cleveland Heights
