More than 50 years ago, the great jazz keyboardist and street poet Gil Scott-Heron recorded a mournful song titled “Winter in America,” employing an effective metaphor for life during the Nixon administration. Like the literal seasons, “Winter in America” has returned, or at least that’s the point of view of a group of local and regional poets who have published a new anthology with that same title.
“Winter in America (Again)” is a response to the 2024 election, and many of the poets published in the volume will be at Bookshop Santa Cruz on Tuesday, including Roxi Power, Julia Chiapella, Dane Cervine, Matt Trease, Paul E. Nelson, Dion O’Reilly and Robert Lashley. On April 15, many of those same poets will again gather for a public event, this time at Satori Arts on the Westside of Santa Cruz. Bookshop’s event takes place at 7 p.m. Tuesday.
On a similar note, UC Santa Cruz is hosting an event titled “Night of Ideas” on Friday at the Institute of the Arts and Sciences on Santa Cruz’s Westside. “Night of Ideas” is a kind of mini-festival of speakers and performers all jumping off from the theme of “Activism, Creativity and Collective Imagination.” Among the guests at the event (5 p.m. on Friday) are author and activist Kim TallBear, artist and community organizer Joy Schendledecker, lecturer and philosopher George Hammond, UCSC philosophy professor Jeanne Proust and more. The IAS is located at 100 Panetta Ave., just off of Delaware Avenue in Santa Cruz. The event is free, but you can register here.
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