Sarah Browning is a poet, editor and
organizer committed to promoting poetry that speaks to everyday people,
that names injustices, or imagines better futures for ourselves and our
societies. Passionate about creating opportunities for other poets to
express themselves, she coedited D.C.
Poets Against the War: An Anthology and coordinates the group of the same name. Sarah also planned
the Split This Rock
Poetry Festival, held March 2008 in D.C.
Sarah's poems have been published in dozens of journals, including the
Seattle Review,
Sycamore Review, and
Shenandoah. She
is the recipient of a D.C. Commission on the Arts & Humanities Individual Artist
Grant and the
People Before
Profits Poetry Prize. Sarah's first book of poems,
Whiskey in the Garden
of Eden, will be released soon by
The Word Works. In her own
poetry, she often grapples with social forces that shape our lives - from
economic and racial inequality to militarism and the impacts of American
policy abroad. Sarah believes that poetry can challenge, provoke, and
lead the way to a better world. We are so delighted she has joined us here. She
welcomes your mail - womenarts2 at aol dot com. You can
browse through and read entries from Beth's
complete historical blog archives
here.
By Sarah Browning on June 13, 2008
In an old issue of off our backs, the feminist news journal, I spot a remembrance of Grace Paley, the poet/fiction writer/activist who died last year, by Judith Arcana, her biographer. Judith's lovely piece ends this way:
"Grace is important to us readers, writers and activists struggling to be conscious, making real art out of what we know as real life, transforming real life into what we want it to be."
And there, under the story, is a large photo of Grace and two men holding a banner in front of a chain-link fence. Nuclear installation? Toxic waste dump? We don't know - we just see the word "This" on the banner. The men look serious, earnest, intense. Grace is short, of course. Her head just peeks out above the word This. She is grinning. This is what I want real life to be. This.
By Sarah Browning on February 24, 2008
Looking for something on my desk (really, it's an excavation, requiring a major grant for archaeological research from the federal government...) I came upon a quote I had saved from, of all places, Publisher's Weekly. Herbert Kohl, a teacher and education writer, was interviewed about his new book, Painting Chinese, which describes his experience taking a Chinese landscape painting class as a 60-year-old surrounded by kindergarteners:
It's wonderful accepting that your goals will never be completed if they're big enough, and that it's worth making them so big that you leave some unfinished so that other people can pick them up after you.
Right on.
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