February 20 & 21, 2011
This year’s theme is Telling Our Stories / Breaking Down Barriers, suggesting the power of story – the many different stories that reveal and inform our lives—to both give voice to the wide range of human experience that makes up the world we all share and bring us together in the very act of sharing these stories with one another.
Stories inspire us, teach us, delight us, and provoke us. Some tickle us all day, and we laugh out loud; others reach far into our souls, and we soak them in tears. They can reveal to us who we are, but also what we aspire to be; the better world we seek to find or even begin to create.
Stories become part of us, and we, part of them. But stories also allow us to become part of each other, giving us something to share, to pass on. For isn’t it true that many of our favorite books and poems are those we enjoy together, parent and child, friend and friend, sister and brother, or grandma and grandpa–taking care of the little ones, or trying to shed some light on teenage life?
Let’s celebrate the power of African American writing in terms of such shared words!
Individual readers are as always welcome, but we also encourage group or communal readings, or reading in pairs, so that the read-in extends beyond the event here today and is recognized in the reading we do together in our lives – a book a friend recommends or loans to another, a bedtime story read and shared between generations, and all the other ways literature brings us together in our lives.