What lessons should and shouldn’t we take from the election debacle, and how do we seize on the strengths we have right now to turn in a new direction? Kate Raphael sits down with Uruguayan born novelist Carolina de Robertis, filmmaker Pamela Harris and acclaimed poet, performer and novelist Aya de Leon.
Carolina De Robertis is author of The Invisible Mountain, Perla and The Gods of Tango and teaches creative writing at San Francisco State University. She is also a former staff member at Bay Area Women Against Rape and cofounder of Exhale, a nonjudgmental after-abortion talkline which calls itself Pro-Voice.
Pamela Harris’s extensive credits include the award-winning documentary Land of Promise: The Story of Allensworth, about a historically black town in California that faces the threat of encroachment by agribusiness; and Waging a Living, a PBS documentary about low-wage working families. A former Fulbright Fellow, she holds a masters degree in journalism from UC Berkeley.
Aya de Leon’s is Director of June Jordan’s Poetry for the People, teaching poetry and spoken word at UC Berkeley. Her work has appeared in the Village Voice, Washington Post, American Theatre Magazine, and has been featured on Def Poetry, in Essence Magazine, and various anthologies and journals. She was named best discovery in theater for 2004 by the SF Chronicle for “Thieves in the Temple : The Reclaiming of Hip Hop.” Her first novel, UPTOWN THIEF, a Latina Robin Hood heist story, was published earlier this year.