My 2018 California Arts Council CAC panelist application

I have worked my entire life in the arts, both as a visual artist and as a poet, teaching people of all ages to access the power of self expression. I have received 7 individual CAC AIS grants including one artist in libraries grant at Napa State Hospital. I have been part of several multi arts CAC and NEA grants, as well as a pilot evaluation grant with Philip Horn. I was on the roster for the Montana Arts Council AIS program as well. I have worked with Herb Kohl, and many other arts educators, and have taught poetry and art residencies in CA and abroad to students of all ages and abilities. I am area coordinator for CalPoets in the East Bay, and I work with diverse populations. I am widely published, and have had numerous art exhibitions, and have been a cultural worker all my life. I have received two regional NEA fellowships, and have collaborated with artists and musicians. I was nominated Poet Laureate of Sonoma County. I have produced literary events for two decades, and coordinate the youth poetry reading for Watershed Festival.

I have worked with underreprrsented and disenfranchised communities for the past 20 years in Oakland, San Francisco and San Jose, and am familiar with the matrix and the needs and cultural sensitivities of underrepresented communities. Through poetry I have taught kids to read while allowing them to develop their creative self expression potential, giving them tools to give them voice. I have worked with public and private school kids, involuntary shut-ins, elders, and disabled populations. Though not formally trained, I am conversationally fluent in Spanish, and have taught residencies where English was not the dominant language. Perhaps the most diverse workshop I ever taught was to cultural workers in a mental hospital in the Netherlands (I also taught in the USSR, where I headed up a poetry and art exchange) where we had not one language in common. (We had a minimum of 5 unrelated languages. I had to think outside the box, as English was not the lingua Franca. I also toured with Ken Larsen, of Rural Arts Services bringing arts programming to isolated CA communities from Covelo to Colusa County. Through Poetry Out Loud, I have trained two Contra Costa student poets to place in the CA state finals, and coordinated POL in Alameda County for 7 years.