Next #Flyychat!!

Monday, March 14th @ 8pm EST!

All We Wanna Do Is Be Free: Youth and Mass Incarceration

 With

Artists, Educators and Activists-

Piper Anderson and Shontina Vernon

" ...some 10,000 children are housed in adult jails and prisons on any given day in America...Children as young as eight have been prosecuted as adults. Some states set the minimum at 10, 12, or 13."   

-- Equal Justice Initiative (www.eji.org/childrenprison)

Let that sink in for a moment. The prison industrial complex is a beast that feeds on the bodies of our children.  

I hope you will join me as I welcome Piper Anderson to the Flyychat and welcome back, Shontina Vernon, who appeared on our very first #Flyychat in October of 2016!   I am honored to be in conversation with these two amazing human beings who are doing transformative work both in and outside of detention centers using, among other things, the power of the arts to heal the trauma experienced by young people in the juvenile justice system.  

Please join us as we discuss root causes of mass incarceration;  the school-to-prison pipeline; alternatives to incarceration and grapple with the question Angela Davis poses in her book: Are Prisons Obsolete? You won't want to miss this one!!  

JOIN US!!!

 

 Bios

Piper Anderson

 

Piper Anderson is a writer, educator, and cultural worker. In 2015 she founded Create Forward LLC, which delivers creative strategies for social change to activate the collective radical imagination. Create Forward is the culmination of Piper’s fifteen years engaged in cultural organizing projects activating creative strategies to end to the criminalization of communities of color. Beginning in 2001, realizing the destructive impact of prisons and policing on her community, Anderson became Blackout Arts Collective’s Lyrics on Lockdown National Tour Coordinator and directed the cultural campaign that reached more than 25 U.S communities creatively catalyzing a dialogue about the impact of the prison system on communities of color. Lyrics on Lockdown has since evolved into a course at NYU’s Gallatin School, taught by Anderson, where her students design and facilitate an arts program for detained youth at Rikers Island. In 2014 the consistent success of the course catalyzed the launch of NYU’s Prison Education Program, which offers an associate degree program to men at Wallkill correctional facility. Anderson is a skilled facilitator, curriculum designer, and cultural organizer who applies her training in applied theatre, trauma recovery, and transformative justice to end all forms of violence, promote healing, and justice.  www.create-forward.com

Shontina Vernon

SHONTINA VERNON, writer/musician/performer, has written several plays exploring themes that are universal to women. The LA Times called her play, PSYCHOLOGY OF CHROMOSOME X, “surprising, radical, and audacious for its candid exploration of black women and their sexuality.” Vernon is a recipient of this year’s 4 Culture Artists’ Grant, a past recipient of the Louise McKinney Playwriting Fellowship, and was the selected inaugural playwright of the Gurfein-Ntozake Shange Reading Series at New Federal Theater. Her work has been produced by Seattle’s ACT Theatre, the Hansberry Project, SoloNova Festival, the Central District Forum for Arts and Ideas, and featured at the World Wide Words International Festival in Copenhagen, Denmark.  Her play, A LOVELY MALFUNCTION had a run at La Mama Theatre in NYC in a collaboration with the esteemed Negro Ensemble Company. Other plays include, ETTA PHIFER’S TESTIMONIAL SHOE KISMET, IN BETWEEN THE ZEBRA’S STRIPES, WOMEN OF THE WILD ROOT, and a solo show titled WANTED – a coming of age tale about forgery, fear, and belonging. She is a National Performance Network touring artist, and a nominated playwright on the 2014 Kilroy’s List.  

Check out Shontina's website here.  And don't forget to visit and "like' her Facebook page:
www.facebook.com/shontinavernon