Artist and business owner Amanda Beard Garcia on shaping meaningful local collaborations Creative entrepreneurs – artists, designers, performers, makers, cultural innovators – are business owners who generate revenue, employ workers, pay taxes, and strengthen local and state economies. As part of our series on Creative Entrepreneurialism, we spoke with Amanda Beard Garcia, … [Read more...]
Interviews
Learning to Be Auntie’s Baby
Artists Simone John (Poetry Fellow '20) (aka Simone Ivory) and flowerthief (one half of the music duo Optic Bloom) collaborated to create the audio poetry project, Auntie's Baby. Auntie's Baby draws on the artists' multidisciplinary background, using family phone calls, poetry, music, and sound to "open a portal into Black storytelling." Recently, Simone and flowerthief … [Read more...]
Heather Kamins, Author of The Moth Girl
On March 8, 2022, 7 PM ET, Heather Kamins (Fiction/Creative Nonfiction Fellow '16) has a virtual book launch event for her young adult novel The Moth Girl (G.P. Putnam's Sons Books 2022), hosted by Odyssey Books in South Hadley. We asked the Western Massachusetts author about the origins of her new novel, the twists and turns of writing it, and her inventive work as a literary … [Read more...]
Miki Sawada: Gather Hear
Miki Sawada is a classically-trained pianist. Since 2017, she's been traveling with a piano, in a van, to community spaces throughout the country, to perform classical music for free. Called the Gather Hear Tour, Miki's project has traveled from Alaska to West Virginia to an upcoming tour in Massachusetts. We asked Miki about the tour, her work, and her life as an artist … [Read more...]
Sara Hendren: Who Is the World Designed For?
This summer marked the 30th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, a turning point in the history of disability rights. During her years of writing, art, design, and research, Sara Hendren (Fiction/Creative Nonfiction Fellow '18) has found the field of disability studies a rich and deep world to explore. "And in the course of all of those years of both writing … [Read more...]