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4th Annual FEMS All-Ages Poetry Festival has ended
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Thursday, October 1
 

5:00pm EDT

Tech Orientation
We understand that technology can be a huge barrier to accessing so many of the virtual offerings. We want to support you in feeling confident in the technology that FEMS will be using throughout the weekend so that you can participate fully! During this tech orientation, a team of volunteers and staff will help you download Zoom, sign up for Discord, navigate the Sched, and any other technology questions that might come up throughout the weekend. You can join the Google Meet with a simple click and we will help you from there! Though this meeting will take place in Google Meet, we will be primarily using Zoom for the festival and this session is intended to help you feel comfortable in our tech spaces.
Thursday October 1, 2020 5:00pm - 6:00pm EDT
Google Meet
  FEMS

6:30pm EDT

Opening Ceremonies featuring Julissa Emile
Let us welcome you to the weekend, ground in our community, honor the land, and celebrate our ability to be Resilient & Transforming! We are honored to have a keynote address by FEMS beloved community member, Julissa Emile (aka juju). 
Keynote title: Online/Offline: Still FEMS
Speakers
avatar for Julissa Emile (they/them)

Julissa Emile (they/them)

Julissa Emile (known affectionately as juju) is a twenty-two year old transplant and chaos baby from the United States Virgin Islands. Their writing focuses on the intersections of blackness, queerness and "if that were a garden, what kind of magic would grow from it". They served... Read More →

Thursday October 1, 2020 6:30pm - 8:00pm EDT
Friends Meeting of Cambridge Online
  Features

8:15pm EDT

Haunted Open Mic
Whether by ghosts and ghouls or that embarrassing thing you said at a party in front of your crush, all hauntings are welcome at the Haunted Open Mic. Share a spooky story, get scary vulnerable, sing the chant from Halloweentown, and help us celebrate the start Spooky Season. Come in costume if you want! 
Thursday October 1, 2020 8:15pm - 9:15pm EDT
FEMS
  Open Mics
 
Friday, October 2
 

12:00pm EDT

Brunch/Lunch with FEMS for Fun
Come socialize, maybe write some poems, set some intentions for the weekend ahead in this informal lunchtime socialization situation!
Friday October 2, 2020 12:00pm - 1:00pm EDT
FEMS
  FEMS

6:00pm EDT

Mapping the Heartbeat
Poems, like many works of art, are not passive in their framing. Stanzas & lines carry conversations, maintain secrets, remember the stories we obsess over & forget. In the reading of poetry, there are ways for us to get closer (as much as we can as outsiders) to the center of what conversations are taking place. The study of enjambment, defined in Poetry Foundation's glossary as, “The running-over of a sentence or phrase from one poetic line to the next, without terminal punctuation,” is one key tool to measure, map, and analyze the "voice(s)" in a poem–which I also like to call the heartbeat(s). 
 
In this workshop, we will be analyzing & dissecting poems by Tatiana Johnson-Boria and Safia Elhillo, to discuss the ways in which enjambment is used as a tool to pace & create pathways for multiple themes to exist throughout a poem. With this knowledge, in the second half of this workshop, participants will be looking back at previous written or newly prompted works with the intention of sharpening skills around meter assessment and tone shifts, through the vehicle of enjambment. This workshop has been created to heighten poetry readers' attention to thematic shifts and form, as well as to develop writers' skills in line breaks and intentionality of tone throughout a poem. This workshop is open to poets of all ages and all levels. 
Speakers
avatar for Golden (they/them)

Golden (they/them)

Golden (they/them) is a black gender-nonconforming trans-femme photographer and poet raised in Hampton, VA, currently residing in Boston, MA. Golden is the recipient of a Pink Door Fellowship (2017/2019), an Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Luminaries Fellowship (2019), the Frontier... Read More →

Friday October 2, 2020 6:00pm - 7:30pm EDT
Friends Meeting of Cambridge Online
  Workshops

6:00pm EDT

Solitude & Ourselves: Writing for Lonely Times
Ocean Vuong writes, "& remember: loneliness is still time spent with the world". During a time of isolation, fear, and burnout, what does it mean to be alone? How do we care for ourselves while being physically apart from our communities? This workshop aims to create a space to talk and write about the ways in which we may feel too singular or quiet in our everyday lives, both before and during this pandemic.
Speakers
avatar for Lyd Havens (they/she)

Lyd Havens (they/she)

Lyd Havens is a writer, reader, and Scorpio moon living in Boise, Idaho. Their work has previously been published in Ploughshares, The Shallow Ends, and Foglifter, among others. They are the author of the chapbook I Gave Birth to All the Ghosts Here (Nostrovia! Press, 2018), as well... Read More →

Friday October 2, 2020 6:00pm - 7:30pm EDT
Friends Meeting of Cambridge Online
  Workshops

7:30pm EDT

Resilient & Transforming: A Panel of Healers on Surviving this Moment
What are the spiritual, emotional, astrological tools that can help us survive this moment, remain grounded in our resilience, and hold on to our ability to transform ourselves and the world? Join us on Friday, October 2nd at 7:00 PM EST for a panel of incredible healers in discussion on what healing in this moment can look like.
Moderators
avatar for sol (they/them)

sol (they/them)

sol (they/them) is a venezuelan-american community organizer, freelance facilitator, energy worker and intuitive space holder living on occupied wampanoag territory. sol is a budding herbalist with a deep astrology and tarot practice. they are a learning-abolitionist and experiment... Read More →

Speakers
avatar for Banah Ghadbanah (zhe/she/they)

Banah Ghadbanah (zhe/she/they)

Banah Ghadbanah is a nonbinary queer Syrian poet (pronouns: zhe, she, they) published in As/Us: Queer Issue, Sukoon, an Arab-themed literary magazine, Aunt Chloe: a Journal for Artful Candor, Passage & Place: A Print Anthology on Home, Acting Up: Queer in the New Century Anthology... Read More →
avatar for Terna (she/her)

Terna (she/her)

Terna (say Tayna) is a liberian/nigerian/american healing facilitator, body- & energy-based psychotherapist, energy worker (Jin Shin Jyutsu), lay qigong teacher and artist based in Western Massachusetts. She has worked across a range of organizations and institutions including the... Read More →
avatar for Myrto (she/hers)

Myrto (she/hers)

Myrto is a community herbalist and astrologer living on Mahican territory. She focuses on sexual healing and health through plant medicine and sex work. Myrto teaches many classes on astrology and planet medicine, drawing from her lineage wisdom of the Mediterranean.
avatar for Ana Maria (she/hers)

Ana Maria (she/hers)

Ana Maria is an Afro-Taino self healer, budding herbalist, full spectrum birth doula, birth educator, photographer and community organizer. A graduate of Seed Root and Bloom and Ile Ashe Herbalism programs, and currently a student of the Sistahs of the Calabash. She has dedicated... Read More →

Friday October 2, 2020 7:30pm - 9:00pm EDT
Friends Meeting of Cambridge Online
  Features
 
Saturday, October 3
 

12:00pm EDT

Poetry Through Meditation
We invite all to intentionally reflect inwardly as we learn how to cultivate mindful tools for radical healing.Faith Aya will lead the group into meditation blended with poetry, scripts from experts in mindfulness, and guided breath-work. We will then spend the last 20 minutes working on a duality writing exercise and the last few minutes to share and reflect. Our intention is for our time to be a space filled with an abundance of peace and compassion.
Speakers
avatar for Faith Aya (she/her)

Faith Aya (she/her)

Faith Aya is a poet, visual artist and a data scientist. Twenty-two years ago, Faith Aya discovered therapy through her pen. She wrote her first poem about her Nigerian deceased mother called “There’s Something Missing in My Life”. It wasn’t a school assignment. She was simply... Read More →

Saturday October 3, 2020 12:00pm - 1:30pm EDT
Friends Meeting of Cambridge Online
  Workshops

12:00pm EDT

Using Music to Elevate Your Poetry
This workshop draws clear connections between music/lyric writing and performance poetry. Together we will introduce techniques for analyzing lyric structure through rhythm, evocative imagery, and breakdown pop writing techniques such as melodic math and show how these techniques can translate into writing and lead to other nuanced ways of enjoying performed poetry.
Speakers
avatar for Star Quilon (they/them)

Star Quilon (they/them)

Star is the lead singer and songwriter of The Sunset Kings, a genre-blurring indie rock band born in Boston out of the collision of its powerhouse poetry and music scene.  Star's signature lyrical style blends cinematic imagery with poetic precision, and is informed as much by garage... Read More →

Saturday October 3, 2020 12:00pm - 1:30pm EDT
Friends Meeting of Cambridge Online
  Workshops

2:00pm EDT

The Short Script as a Form Poem
In "The Short Script as a Form Poem", an AI-facilitated, online writing workshop, we will examine the writing processes that underlie success in the slam format, adapt them to the process of conceptualizing a compelling short film script, and discuss approaches to composition that magnify words' ability to help us understand our experiences.
Speakers
avatar for Marshall

Marshall "gripp" Gillson (they/them)

Marshall "gripp" Gillson is a writer / programmer / educator based primarily on the internet. Marshall graduated from Morehouse College in 2009 and the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2012. Their work is multimedia and interdisciplinary, ranging from written word to performance... Read More →

Saturday October 3, 2020 2:00pm - 3:30pm EDT
Friends Meeting of Cambridge Online
  Workshops

2:00pm EDT

what's a body?
in this workshop/lecture, we will talk about poetry and the body by extracting from “body” all the things we mean when we use that word, and then connecting them as we write, both in formal ways and intuitive ways. so, bodies and embodiment. how many different bodies are there, and why it’s important to decenter the human body, and then align it with everything else a body can be, metaphorically, in the natural world, and collectively with other human bodies. this feels necessary in a world that imposes so much on humans and nature with language, with labor, with violence. and then we internalize these things as truth, even those of us who live by tenants of resistance.
Speakers
avatar for Jess Rizkallah (she/her)

Jess Rizkallah (she/her)

Jess Rizkallah is a Lebanese-American writer and illustrator. Her full-length collection THE MAGIC MY BODY BECOMES was a finalist for The Believer Poetry Award and won the 2017 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize as awarded by the Radius of Arab-American Writers and University of Arkansas Press... Read More →

Saturday October 3, 2020 2:00pm - 3:30pm EDT
Friends Meeting of Cambridge Online
  Workshops

4:00pm EDT

Queer Open Mic
Join us for an LGBTQIA open mic! Share your gayest poems, revel in trans magic, celebrate and mourn, whatever feels right. 
All are welcome, AND the virtual mic is reserved for LGBTQIA people exclusively.
Saturday October 3, 2020 4:00pm - 5:00pm EDT
Friends Meeting of Cambridge Online
  Open Mics

5:00pm EDT

BIPOC Open Mic
When we share our voices, our ancestors are a little bit more heard, a little bit more seen. When we share our stories, we become home for each other. Join us for a BIPOC open mic! 
All are welcome, AND the virtual mic is reserved for BIPOC people exclusively.
Saturday October 3, 2020 5:00pm - 6:00pm EDT
Friends Meeting of Cambridge Online
  Open Mics

7:00pm EDT

Show Me Your Boutfit!
Though we won’t be experiencing the ICONIC fashion sense of the FEMS community in person, we still want to see your favorite would-be-boutfits! Try on a new expression, wear your favorite sweater, do nothing and still show up, we wanna celebrate the FEMS look-book virtually! Accompanied by two musical guests, The Noisy and Jesscx!
Speakers
avatar for JESSCX (she/they)

JESSCX (she/they)

JESSCX (she/they) is a Boston based artist that explores self-identity and Black life through collage, video art, mixed media works, and song. Combining Buddhist principles of mindfulness and presence with West African traditions of story-telling, JESSCX creates work intended to... Read More →
avatar for Sara Mae / The Noisy (she/they)

Sara Mae / The Noisy (she/they)

Sara Mae is a white, queer poet and fashion witch raised between Baltimore and Annapolis, Maryland. Her work can be found in Peach Mag, Tinderbox, Breakwater Review and elsewhere. Their first chapbook, Priestess of Tankinis, is out via Game Over Books. In her free time, she is learning... Read More →

Saturday October 3, 2020 7:00pm - 9:00pm EDT
Friends Meeting of Cambridge Online
  Features
 
Sunday, October 4
 

12:00pm EDT

Facilitated Co-Work/Edit Space
If you aren’t interested in attending the Future of FEMS, we will be hosting a lightly facilitated space for editing, co-working, and connecting during that time. 
Sunday October 4, 2020 12:00pm - 2:00pm EDT
Google Meet
  FEMS

12:00pm EDT

The Future of FEMS
Every year during the tournament, we host the Future of FEMS meeting to invite competitors and community members to share with us what is working and what isn’t about FEMS. Please join us in a facilitated reflection of FEMS and how we can better support our community.
Speakers
avatar for Sara Mae / The Noisy (she/they)

Sara Mae / The Noisy (she/they)

Sara Mae is a white, queer poet and fashion witch raised between Baltimore and Annapolis, Maryland. Her work can be found in Peach Mag, Tinderbox, Breakwater Review and elsewhere. Their first chapbook, Priestess of Tankinis, is out via Game Over Books. In her free time, she is learning... Read More →

Sunday October 4, 2020 12:00pm - 2:00pm EDT
FEMS
  FEMS

2:00pm EDT

abolition now! Poems to #FreeThemAll
Drawing on the work of Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Tourmaline, and other Black femmes and marginally gendered people, this workshop explores how poems can be a way of freedom dreaming and placemaking that can point us towards abolitionist futures. We'll read some poems together and learn about ways to support ongoing freedom campaigns to support currently incarcerated folks. The workshop will culminate in steps to take action, including letter writing to incarcerated folks.
Speakers
avatar for Laurel Chen (they/them)

Laurel Chen (they/them)

Laurel Chen is an abolitionist and a queer/trans/migrant writer from Taiwan. A fellow of Kundiman, Undocupoets, and Pink Door, they are currently earning their B.A. in Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley (Huichin Ohlone Territory).

Sunday October 4, 2020 2:00pm - 3:30pm EDT
Friends Meeting of Cambridge Online
  Workshops

2:00pm EDT

Making Room for Pleasure in the Body
In this workshop, pleasure is brought to the centre. Based on the writings of Adrienne Marie Brown in Pleasure Activism and other queer love poems. This is a space to write about our desire in all forms, and to get in touch with our euphoric yes in our writing, to write about the people, places, and things that give us our deepest joy. Poets will come away with tools for mindful masturbation, platonic self massage, and questions to implore the ways we are enduring and holding in our bodies and find resistance to endurance in our poems.
Speakers
avatar for Cassandra Rachel Myers (they/she)

Cassandra Rachel Myers (they/she)

Cassandra Myers (they/she) is a queer, trans, crip, mad, South Asian-Italian, from Tkoronto, Ontario. Cassandra has performed her poetry across Turtle Island and has received the Best Poet Award at CUPSI. A Masters of Social Work Candidate at York University, Cassandra is an arts-educator... Read More →

Sunday October 4, 2020 2:00pm - 3:30pm EDT
Friends Meeting of Cambridge Online
  Workshops

4:00pm EDT

Channeling Quiet Ferocity
Quiet Ferocity refers to calculated passion, streamlined temper, and/or insidious rage. When fury dissipates, quiet ferocity haunts. In this workshop, we will discuss the concept of quiet ferocity (especially how it operates within fem poetry), go over the technical aspects of how it's achieved, look over two example poems and most excitingly, we will undergo a generative meditative practice that will move us into a space of creation and poem building. At the end, we will surely have an open mic! 
Speakers
avatar for Angie Lopez (they/them)

Angie Lopez (they/them)

Angie Lopez is a multimedia artist and writer whose work draws upon the complexities of gender, heritage, and temporality. They consider spoken word to be the foundation of their artistry and often center it in their performance and media work. As an artist, they value vulnerability... Read More →

Sunday October 4, 2020 4:00pm - 5:00pm EDT
Friends Meeting of Cambridge Online
  Workshops

4:00pm EDT

In the Beginning: (Re)Writing Our Creation Myths
In this workshop, we will look at poets working through and with myths of creation, using the work of Adrienne Novy and others as a starting point. This will include religious allegory, but also poems centered around creation in terms of (re)birth. After discussion, we will then generate pieces concerning these sorts of myths, wether that involves the origin story of the whole universe or just of the poet themself. There will be time to share at the end of the workshop, though this is in no way required!
Speakers
avatar for Lip Manegio (they/he)

Lip Manegio (they/he)

Lip Manegio is a trans, queer nonbinary poet based in Boston.  Their work has been nominated for a Pushcart & has appeared in Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Puerto del Sol, the minnesota review, Tin House, and elsewhere. They hold a BFA in creative writing from Emerson College, & are... Read More →

Sunday October 4, 2020 4:00pm - 5:00pm EDT
Friends Meeting of Cambridge Online
  Workshops

6:30pm EDT

Finals Showcase Featuring Charlotte Abotsi and Rachel McKibbens
We will be showcasing FEMS 2020 Festival participants alongside two features. Instead of a Finals stage of competition, we are creating space to celebrate the folks who have joined us to write, create community, and be together over the course of the weekend.We are incredibly lucky to be hosting Charlotte Abotsi and Rachel McKibbens as our 4th Annual FEMS Festival Features!
Moderators
avatar for Sarah Nnenna Loveth Nwafor (she/they)

Sarah Nnenna Loveth Nwafor (she/they)

Sarah Nnenna Loveth Nwafor (She and They pronouns) is a queer Nigerian-American Poet and Facilitator who descends of a powerful ancestry. They believe in storytelling/poetry as magick and healing. They speak to keep alive traditions of Igbo orature; when they witness, her forebears... Read More →

Speakers
avatar for Charlotte Abotsi (she/her)

Charlotte Abotsi (she/her)

Charlotte Abotsi is a writer and educator who lives in Providence, Rhode Island. She currently serves as the Director of the Providence Poetry Slam. As a poet, she has competed in several international slams, placing in the top 20 poets at the 2016 Women of the World Poetry Slam... Read More →
avatar for Rachel McKibbens (she/her)

Rachel McKibbens (she/her)

Rachel McKibbens is a salty Xicana witch, poet & noise maker. She is a two-time New York Foundation for the Arts poetry fellow and author of three full-length books of poetry, Pink Elephant, Into The Dark & Emptying Field, blud, plus a chapbook, MAMMOTH.  In 2012, McKibbens founded... Read More →

Sunday October 4, 2020 6:30pm - 8:30pm EDT
Friends Meeting of Cambridge Online
  Features
 
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