Dear Community & Friends of the Jack Kerouac School:
Lisa Birman and I are writing to you from the Summer Writing Program Office. We know that the Naropa environment has suffered because of the recent downsizing of Naropa staff at large. 23 staff members, though no one from Summer Writing Program or Writing & Poetics, were laid off in June. The community has suffered tremendously as these individuals were part of our world and community. We all have questions and concerns. Our hearts and support go out to those individuals.
However, there are some clearer answers now, and we are more than willing to address your grievances as much as we can. Students are gathering these days to address and protest their concerns, which center on issues of transparency, student involvement in university-wide decisions, diversity issues, and the well being of the campus and all who are engaged here…
the whole post is here. It’d would be a shame to the poetry community for this school to be closed down.
About Splabman
Poet & interviewer Paul E Nelson founded SPLAB (Seattle Poetics LAB) & the Cascadia Poetry Festival. Since 1993, SPLAB has produced hundreds of poetry events & 600 hours of interview programming with legendary poets & whole systems activists including Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Joanne Kyger, Robin Blaser, Diane di Prima, Daphne Marlatt, Nate Mackey, George Bowering, Barry McKinnon, José Kozer, Brenda Hillman & many others. Paul’s books include American Prophets (interviews 1994-2012) (2018) American Sentences (2015) A Time Before Slaughter (2009) and Organic in Cascadia: A Sequence of Energies (2013). Co-Editor of Make It True: Poetry From Cascadia (2015), 56 Days of August: Poetry Postcards (2017) and Samthology: A Tribute to Sam Hamill (2019) Make it True meets Medusario (2019), he’s presented poetry/poetics in London, Brussels, Nanaimo, Qinghai & Beijing, China, has had work translated into Spanish, Chinese & Portuguese & writes an American Sentence every day. Awarded a residency at The Lake, from the Morris Graves Foundation in Loleta, CA, he’s published work in Golden Handcuffs Review, Zen Monster, Hambone, and elsewhere. Winner of the 2014 Robin Blaser Award from The Capilano Review, he is engaged in a 20 year bioregional cultural investigation of Cascadia and lives in Rainier Beach, in the Cascadia bioregion’s Cedar River watershed.
