T171.
Anthology Activism: Creating Space for Marginalized Voices
Thursday, March 9, 2023
12:10 pm to 1:25 pm
Kari Gunter-Seymour’s Women Speak anthologies and I Thought I Heard a Cardinal Sing, funded by the Academy of American poets, create spaces for marginalized writers within Appalachia and beyond. As editor, Gunter-Seymour describes the process of intentionally creating books that support all writers within Appalachia and women, Affrilachian, and LGBTQ+ authors in particular. Authors from the collections discuss how activist anthologies support their individual works and personal activist goals.
Participants
Hayley Mitchell Haugen is a poet and professor of English at Ohio University Southern. She is the editor and publisher of Sheila-Na-gig Editions. Her most recent collection, The Blue Wife Poems, is available from Kelsay Books.
Kari Gunter-Seymour is Ohio's Poet Laureate, a 9th generation Appalachian, the author of three books of poetry, editor of ten anthologies, an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow, 2020 Ohio Poet of the year, and the founder/executive director of the Women of Appalachia Project.
Mark Youssef is a poet and physician practicing in the Cincinnati area. In addition to his MD, he has an MA in English and is working toward his MFA in poetry, joining an impressive lineage of physician poets. Mark was born and raised in Kentucky.
Barbara Marie Minney is a transgender woman, award-winning poet, retired attorney, and quiet activist. Her first collection of poetry, If There's No Heaven, was the winner of the 2020 Poetry Is Life Book Award and was selected by the Akron Beacon Journal as a Best Northeast Ohio Book in 2020.
Lynette Ford is a fourth-generation Affrilachian narrative artist with the Ohio Teaching Artists Roster and Creative Aging Project, an award-winning writer and anthologist, a storytelling and creative-writing coach, and a member of the National Association of Black Storytellers’ Circle of Elders.
