Celebrating Whittier Annual Fundraiser shines the spotlight on local wordsmiths past and present

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When:
September 13, 2014 @ 6:00 pm – 9:00 pm
2014-09-13T18:00:00-04:00
2014-09-13T21:00:00-04:00
Where:
Holy Family Parish Hall
9 Sparhawk Street
Amesbury, MA 01913
USA
Cost:
$40.00
Contact:
Whittier Home Association

Buy tickets here.

Benefitting the historic preservation and programs of Amesbury’s Whittier Home, a national historic landmark, this gala event will feature the inspirational words and work of our region’s famous activist and poet, John Greenleaf Whittier. Whittier’s role as activist for social justice is the underlying theme for this year’s program. His progressive ideas that bear important relevance today, will come alive through music, poetry and artistic performance.

Catered delights by Adele Faso will be provided, and a cash bar offering wine and beer will be available. Tickets are $40.00 per person and available through the Whittier Home website. whittierhome.org

The Program

Along with music provided by John Tavano, students from Amesbury and Newburyport High School will open the program with selections of Whittier’s work (and possibly some of their own original works) that reflect the poet’s activism as an abolitionist and champion of human rights.

Newburyport’s poet Rhina Espaillat, along with the Powow River Poets will present, “John Greenleaf Whittier: A Voice for Our Time,” Their performance will consist of five Whittier poems. One will be presented as a song to music by Charles Ives, and the other four will be performed as a melopoeia by two or more members of the Powow River Poets accompanied by John Tavano on the guitar.

About Our Poets

Rhina Espaillat – Rhina P. Espaillat was born in the Dominican Republic in 1932. She has lived in the United States since 1939 and taught high school English in New York City for several years. Espaillat writes poetry and prose both in English and in her native Spanish. Her work has appeared in numerous magazines, including The Lyric, Poetry, Sparrow, Orbis, The Formalist, and The American Scholar, as well as some forty anthologies. Espaillat has eight poetry collections in print, including Where Horizons Go, which won the 1998 T. S. Eliot Prize; Rehearsing Absence, which won the 2001 Richard Wilbur Award; and most recently, Playing at Stillness. In 2004 she became the first winner of the Tree at My Window Award from the Robert Frost Foundation for her Spanish translations of Robert Frost and her English translations of Saint John of the Cross and César Sánchez Beras. That same year she also received the Dominican Republic’s Salome Ureña de Henríquez Award for service to Dominican culture and education.

Espaillat lives in Newburyport, MA, with her husband Alfred Moskowitz, a sculptor. For 14 years, she coordinated the Newburyport Art Association’s Annual Poetry Contest, is on the planning committee of the Newburyport Literary Festival, and is a founding member and former director of the Powow River Poets. She has also been instrumental in bringing about bilingual poetry readings in the area north of Boston, and has assisted teachers Debbie Szabo and César Sánchez Beras with the planning for bilingual activities shared by high school students of Lawrence, Massachusetts, and Newburyport.

Powow River Poets – The Powow River Poets are a gathering of accomplished New England poets, centered in Newburyport, MA, but including members from as far as the Boston area and New Hampshire. Members are widely published in journals, anthologies, and their own collections. and have won numerous awards for both original poetry and translations. The thrust of the group is toward formal prosody, and it is best known in that regard, but while many members employ rhyme, meter and form, others write primarily or exclusively in free verse.

After a brief intermission, the highlight of the Celebrating Whittier event will offer storytellers Susan Lenoe and Lani Peterson in a dramatic historical representation of an interactive “parlor meeting” with Sarah and Angelina Grimke, sisters who were born into a slave-owning family in South Carolina, who grew up to be 19th-century American Quakers, educators & writers who were early advocates of abolitionism & women’s rights.

About the Actual Grimke Sisters – Sarah Moore Grimke (1792–1873) and Angelina Emily Grimke (1805–1879), known as the Grimke sisters, were 19th-century Southern American Quakers, educators and writers who were early advocates of abolitionism and women’s rights. Angelina Grimke married abolitionist Theodore Dwight Weld in May 1838, and changed her name to Angelina Grimke Weld.

They were born in Charleston, South Carolina, USA. Sarah Moore Grimke was born on November 26, 1792 and Angelina Emily Grimke was born on February 20, 1805. Throughout their lives, they traveled throughout the North, lecturing about their first hand experiences with slavery on their family’s plantation. Among the first American women to act publicly n social reform movements, they received abuse and ridicule for their abolitionist activity. They both realized that women would have to create a safe space in the public arena to be effective reformers. They became early activists in the women’s rights movement.

About Susan Lenoe – Susan Lenoe specializes in portraying women in history. She engages the audience in her stories as she explores the forces that triggered her characters to push beyond the restrictions of their lives and to act in ways that changed the world.
On a whirlwind tour in 1837, Angelina and Sarah Grimke of South Carolina visited more than 70 towns in Massachusetts to tell first hand of the horrors of slavery. Speaking out in public, challenging Northerners’ fears of abolition, Sarah and Angelina’s determined voices swayed the direction of the anti-slavery debate. The first women to address a state (Massachusetts) legislature, their daring call to action planted the seeds for the future of the suffragist movement.

Set in the aftermath of the Philadelphia riots and burning of Pennsylvania Hall in the spring of 1838, Susan and Lani as Sarah and Angelina Grimke bring to life these forgotten heroines. This powerful story of two women who find the courage to act upon their convictions will educate and inspire young people of today.

The Grimkes had the distinction of being chosen to perform at the National Endowment for the Humanities Colloquium on the American Lyceum movement in May of 2007.