We Were Not Alone: A Community Building Art Works Anthology - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0578301555 ISBN 13: 9780578301556

Publisher: Community Building Art Works, 2021

Synopsis

Since 2010, Community Building Art Works has been building community in military hospitals through workshops led by professional artists. In that time, we've learned that more voices make for stronger community. In March 2020, in response to the COVID-19 crisis, we moved our workshops at Walter Reed and Ft Belvoir online and opened them up to everyone, regardless of military connection. We formed the United Against Silence Collective, made up of the extraordinary poets and artists who lent their time and shared their wisdom. We read poems that inspired us, poems that offered an opening for us to begin to find words for our collective and individual griefs, joys, and transformations. At "the altar of the laptop," as Army veteran and community member Anne Barlieb calls it, people from around the world met weekly to write and cry and laugh, to hold one another across space. 

The poems included in this anthology are written by members of the collective and members of the community. They are the poems that were essential to our survival, poems that built a growing online family and community of support. The poems contained here reminded us that We Were Not Alone. We hope they remind you, also, that you are not alone.

About this title

About the Authors

Hari Alluri is the author of The Flayed City (Kaya). A winner of the 2020 Leonard A. Slade, Jr. Poetry Fellowship and recipient of grants from the BC Arts Council and Canada Council for the arts, his work appears widely in anthologies, journals, and online venues, including Apogee, Asian American Literary Review, Poetry, Split This Rock, Witness, and elsewhere.

Seema Reza is the author of A Constellation of Half-Lives & When the World Breaks Open. Based in Maryland, she has led writing workshops within correctional facilities, military and civilian hospitals, elementary and secondary schools, and universities. She is the CEO of Community Building Art Works, a unique arts organization that encourages the use of the arts as a tool for narration, self-care and socialization among a military population struggling with emotional and physical injuries. Reza's work with veterans is featured in the 2018 HBO documentary We Are Not Done Yet. She was awarded the Col John Gioia Patriot Award by the USO of Metropolitan Washington-Baltimore for her work with service members. An alumnus of Goddard College and VONA, she has had writing online and in print in McSweeney's, The LA Review, The Feminist Wire, The Offing, and Entropy among others. Case studies from her work with military populations have appeared in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Related Diseases in Combat Veterans. She has performed across the country at universities, theaters, festivals, bookstores, conferences, & one fine mattress shop.

Jewel Kilcher is an American singer-songwriter, musician, actress, and author. She has received four Grammy Award nominations and, as of 2021, has sold over 30 million albums worldwide. Jewel was raised near Homer, Alaska, where she grew up singing and yodeling as a duo with her father, a local musician.

Edition details

• Publisher: Community Building Art Works
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0578301555
• ISBN 13: 9780578301556
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 144
• Editor: Alluri Hari, Reza Seema