Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond and Julianne Neely will start their week at Chautauqua with the Writers’ Center Faculty Reading at 3:30 p.m. Sunday in the Hall of Philosophy.
Brew-Hammond is the author of award-winning children’s book Blue: A History of the Color as Deep as the Sea and as Wide as the Sky, illustrated by Caldecott Honor Artist Daniel Minter, and she co-leads a writing fellowship each month that aims to “write light into darkness.” Her most recent novel, My Parents’ Marriage, was just released on Tuesday and explores different types of marriages in Ghana and the confusion and anxiety that surrounds them.
For her faculty reading, she will be reading passages from My Parents’ Marriage, and exploring how to connect with emotions through faith.
“There’s so many ways to write by the Spirit and, for me, it’s not about whether or not you have a specific faith or you have no faith,” she said. “It is about tapping into that place, that is, where we talk about inspiration.”
Throughout the week, Brew-Hammond will be teaching a workshop called “Writing by the Spirit” through the Writers’ Center and Special Studies that will encourage incorporating faith and spiritual practices into writing.
She wants to challenge people to think about faith as a way to expand their idea of what inspiration means, and to feel where it comes from and how they can tap into it to create art and literature.
“We are all writing by the Spirit; it depends on which spirit you’re writing by. But we’re all writing by the Spirit,” she said. “This idea of having to put yourself in an altered reality or altered state to really connect with your emotions, or lose the inhibitions that are needed to really write from the heart — I wanted to explore all of that.”
Poet-in-residence Neely will also be leading a workshop — titled “Poetry in Motion” — this week, focused on exploring and expressing unique identities by celebrating diversity in all aspects of the word.
Neely has been honored with a Capote Fellowship, the 2017 John Logan Poetry Prize, and a Schupes Fellowship for Poetry.
She is the author of three poetry chapbooks, and an upcoming digital fourth, and is currently a poetics Ph.D. student and an English Department Fellow at the University at Buffalo.
She hopes that workshop attendees can come together and think of how their poetry can affect other people and themselves, looking to the future.
“I hope that when they leave the workshop, they’ll have the language to discuss with other people how poetry can affect our planet, how we can think about it in terms of growth, and as the world expands, how can poetry expand,” Neely said.
During the faculty reading, she will be relating her poetry to this week’s Chautauqua Lecture Series “Eight Billion and Counting: The Future of Humankind in a Crowded World.”
“There’s a lot of unprecedented events and times that we’re living through right now,” she said. “How can we use poetry to connect to the feelings of something that is unprecedented?”
