Literary Durbar! For the Rights of Minorities and Refugees, and against xenophobic mentalities!

The Rights of Minorities: ChagallPAC’s Fourth Friday Literary Salon Series and the Cambridge Writers Workshop Institute of International Education Benefit Reading goes live on Facebook on July 24, 2020 8:00pm-9:00pm at

https://www.facebook.com/events/787916261965593

Facebook Event links (info about event, includes live link in location) are below:

short link:
https://bit.ly/3jquaui
Long link: https://www.facebook.com/events/787916261965593/787936898630196/?notif_t=admin_plan_mall_activity&notif_id=1595350436708886

Come for a literary salon of talk and performance of Historical Fiction,Forbidden Love, Family Saga, Romance, the Rights of Minorities, and other ways of polishing the jewel and savoring the tutti-frutti of literature and performance.

And come for the love of diversity, stay for the love of global literary fiction, because “Literature exposes us to distress” (Jhumpa Lahiri) too easily forgotten otherwise. https://poeticacom.wordpress.com/2020/07/05/i-hate-2020/

Again, the reading supporting the Rights of Minorities and International Students goes live on

July 24, 2020 8:00pm-9:00pm on Facebook Live at https://www.facebook.com/creativenorthshore/live/

*****In light of recent pressures against allowing international students — futuremakers — to stay in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic, CWW would like to emphasize their support of international connection and study.******

Organizers Diana Norma Szokolyai and Rita Banerjee say, “Many of our own writing retreats are held abroad, and since we have come to understand firsthand the importance of international exchange, we hope to show solidarity with international students during this time by directing resources and attention to IIE.”

Let’s build a One Planet Education Network or the One Planet Life, where the Rights of Minorities are taken away at the risk of taking away all persons’ rights. https://poeticacom.wordpress.com/2020/07/14/whats-the-time/

“IIE’s mission is to help people and organizations leverage the power of international education to thrive in today’s interconnected world. We believe that when education transcends borders, it opens minds, enabling people to go beyond building connections to solving problems together. Our vision is a peaceful, equitable world enriched by the international exchange of ideas and greater understanding between people and cultures.” https://poeticacom.wordpress.com/2020/06/16/au-autobiography-of-political-blackness-installment-1-whence/

IIE focuses on work that “advances scholarship, builds economies, and promotes access to opportunity.” They run over 200 programs for international students with more than 29,000 participants.

https://www.iie.org/Donate/Where-to-give

Here are the folks who will share their artforms against xenophobic mentality:

Stephen Aubrey is a Brooklyn-based writer and theater-maker. His fiction and essays have appeared in CRAFT Literary, Electric Literature, Publishing Genius, and The Brooklyn Review. As a co-founder and co-artistic director of The Assembly Theater Company, his plays have been produced at The New Ohio Theater, The Living Theater, The Ontological-Hysteric Theater, The Flea Theater, The Collapsable Hole, and Edinburgh Fringe Festival where his original play, We Can’t Reach You, Hartford, was nominated for the prestigious Fringe First Award. He is an instructor of English at Brooklyn College.   

Nandini Bhattacharya was born and raised in India and has called the United States her second continent for the last thirty years. Wherever she has lived, she has generally turned to books for answers to life’s big and small questions. Her short stories have been published in Meat for Tea: the Valley Review, Storyscape Journal, Raising Mothers, The Bacon Review, The Bangalore Review, OyeDrum, and Ozone Park Journal. She has attended the Bread Loaf Writers’ Workshop and held residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, VONA, and Craigardan Writers Residency (forthcoming). She was first runner-up for the Los Angeles Review Flash Fiction contest (2017-2018), a finalist for the Fourth River Folio Contest for Prose Prize (2018), long-listed for the Disquiet International Literary Prize (2019 and 2020), and a finalist for the Reynolds-Price International Women’s Literary Award (2019). Love’s Garden is her first novel. She is currently working on a second novel about love, racism, xenophobia and other mysteries, titled Homeland Blues. She lives outside Houston with her family and two marmalade cats. Visit her at

https://www.amazon.com/author/nandinibhattacharyawrites

and read about Love’s Garden at

Elizabeth Devlin is a visual artist, poet, singer, and multi-instrumentalist. She is the curator of numerous art, music, and literary events including the series: The Highwaymen NYC, Prose By Any Other, and Token Folk Acoustic. As the Founding Director of Bessie’s, a private artist studio and salon, Devlin hosts art, community, literary and acoustic music events in Brooklyn. Devlin has toured nationally and internationally for over a decade. An autoharpist and singer-songwriter with avant-garde-folk sensibilities, she defies traditional song structures, weaving small worlds where magic and fantasies collide. Devlin’s third full-length album, Orchid Mantis, released in 2017, received 4.5/5 from Impose Magazine and is the follow-up to the previously released albums: For Whom the Angels Named, in 2011, Ladybug EP in 2011 and All Are Relative, in 2009. In 2020, Devlin will release her second EP, Conscientious Objector. Post-COVID, Devlin will continue to tour and will release her fourth full-length album, My Father’s Country.

Heather Thomas Loepp is pursuing an MFA in creative writing; meddling with her favorites: poetry, hybrid and the lyric essay. She has worked previously as a journalist, writing profiles on local artists, events, and the music scene—writing songs long before poetry in bands since childhood. Her poetry explores Native American mixed-blood identity, the camaraderie that can be found in poverty, and intergenerational trauma with humor & tenderness. She is working on publishing her first book of poems, entitled If I Were an Unhooked Rabbit. Heather spends her free time cooking elaborate meals for no one in her tiny house in the woods, where the fear of being mauled by a neighborhood cougar is a daily concern. Please send help or dinner guests. 

Diana Norma Szokolyai is the Executive Artistic Director of Cambridge Writers’ Workshop and co-founder of Chagall Performance Art Collaborative. Her books are CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos & Sourcebook for Creative Writing, Parallel Sparrows, and Roses in the Snow. Her poetry manuscript, Milk & Water, was a finalist for Hunger Mountain’s 2020 May Day Mountain chapbook series. Her poetry was also shortlisted for the 2018 Bridport Prize and received honorable mention in the 87th Annual Writer’s Digest Competition. Her work has been published in MER VOX Quarterly, VIDA, Quail Bell Magazine, The Boston Globe, Luna Luna Magazine, and has been anthologized in Other Countries: Contemporary Poets Rewiring History, Teachers As Writers, and Die Morgendämmerung der Worte Moderner Poesie-Atlas der Roma und Sinti. Her poetry–music collaborations have hit the Creative Commons Hot 100 list and been featured on WFMU radio.