Talk:Shailja Patel

2001:18E8:2:28D2:F000:0:0:297 (talk) 20:59, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

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"Shailja Patel: Poet, Playwright, Activist." Shailja Patel: Poet, Playwright, Activist. N.p., n.d. Web. 22 Mar. 2015. Nikdit (talk) 12:13, 22 March 2015 (UTC)Nikhil Dittakavi

Patel, Shailja. Contemporary Literature, Vol. 52, No. 4, AMERICAN POETRY, 2000-2009 (WINTER 2011), pp. 818-851

HopehouriganIU (talk) 15:15, 5 March 2015 (UTC)Hope Hourigan

Patel, Shailja. "Drum Rider: A Tribute To Bi Kidude." Literary Review 52.2 (2009): 147-153. Academic Search Premier. Web. 2 Mar. 2015.

PATEL, SHAILJA. "What Could Have Happened." Poetry 203.6 (2014): 532. Academic Search Premier. Web. 2 Mar. 2015.

Powersjessica (talk)PowersjessicaPowersjessica (talk)

INTRO PARAGRAPH expand upon this As a political thinker, I place myself and my work in the lineage of centuries of progressive struggle that bequeathed us the invaluable awareness of ourselves as firstly human beings, in radical solidarity with all humans on the planet who share a vision of peace, justice, and equality. (3)

BIO From: Nairobi, Kenya (12) She has lived in London and San Francisco and divides her time now between Nairobi and University of California-Berkeley.

I read as “Asian” phenotypically, but I am “African” by birth, geography, and worldview. (3) As an artist I move toward the forms that move me. I’ve been a poet from childhood. When I migrated to the United States and discovered slam, it blew me away, so I immersed myself in it. When I began to write pieces that were too long and complex to slam, theater was the natural space to move into. Now I’ve come full circle to writing again, making work—books, poems, political essays—that migrates freely across continents and languages, independent of my physical body. (3) My grandparents migrated to East Africa in the 1920s and I’m third generation East African. (4) Yes and my parents grew up in colonial Kenya, which was very strictly and heavily segregated. So, they went to all Indian schools and grew up in very segregated Indian communities where they had very little social and economic interaction with Black Africans. Post-independence, those racial barriers broke down to a certain extent, but that stratification has certainly had a huge part in post-independence Kenya and in some of the tensions between different races. (4) Trained as a political economist, accountant and yoga teacher, she uses text, voice, body and critical thinking to delve for truth and dissect power. (10) Patel is a founding member of Kenyans For Peace, Truth and Justice, a civil society coalition that works for an equitable democracy in Kenya. The African Women's Development Fund named her one of Fifty Inspirational African Feminists, ELLE India Magazine selected her as one of its 25 New Guard Influencers and Poetry Africa honored her as Letters To Dennis Poet, continuing the legacy of renowned South African anti-apartheid activist Dennis Brutus. In 2012, she was selected as Kenya's poet for Poetry Parnassus, in the London Cultural Olympiad. (10)

WORKS I invite my audiences and readers to replace the reductionist question of what boxes people fit into with the far more empowering question of how we “do” identity. And similarly, how do we “do” gender, sexuality, struggle, class? (3)

do we need to expand upon the other works she has wrote and make a section for them like how there is one for migritude?

Poems: ICC Kenya Trials: Witness What Could Have Happened (11)

Migritude My book, Migritude, carries a timeline that traces migrations between Asia and Africa back to 800 CE. (3) Migritude explores themes of heritage, war, liberation and, of course, migration. (4) Her trousseau of saris, passed down by her mother, becomes the means by which she unfolds the hidden histories of women's lives from India to East Africa-- the same journey her grandparents took when both regions were under colonial rule. (4) She came up with the word Migritude for the title and this is why: I wanted a word that would capture the idea of migrant attitudes, migrant with attitude. I was playing and riffing off the idea of negritude and migrants. Negritude was the movement in the 1960s that reclaimed and celebrated Black African culture as something powerful in its own right, something that didn’t need to be measured or assessed according to the standards of European culture. So, I was asserting the same thing for migrants and migrant movements, saying there is a voice, a world, view, a space that migrant inhabit that is unique and powerful and defined by itself, not by how close they’ve come to assimilation, not even by where they came from, but the state of being a migrant. (4) And Migritude came from a suitcase full of saris that was passed down to me by my mother. She had been collecting saris and jewelry for me since I was a baby to give to me as my trousseau when I got married and a few years ago, she gave up on me getting married any time soon and said with a small degree of bitterness, “It’s time for you to take your saris.” So, I had this suitcase full of these exquisite heirloom saris that I felt tremendously guilty about because I wasn’t wearing them; I wasn’t using them in my daily life as an artist and an activist. So, I began to think about how I could integrate them into my life, how I could bring out their stories and use them for performance. And as I began to research their histories, as I began to take each sari an unfurl it and trace the motifs and the design and the weaving, they began to tell me stories about Empire, about colonialism, about migrations going back thousands of years, and the histories we don’t know of how Empire was enacted on the bodies of women (4) I trained for two years with two different dance coaches and choreographers and a director to develop the movement vocabulary, to find a conversation that we could have on stage that would make the saris a part of the story rather than simply props. So, from the beginning, I worked with a brilliant director, Kim Cook, who was very committed to creating good art and to excellent stage craft and to making an integrated piece of theater that was not just political, that was not just driven by a political agenda, but that was good theater and good art and good storytelling. The process of whittling down what finally went on stage was akin to making a film. If you were a filmmaker, you shoot a hundred hours of footage and you condense it down to 90 minutes of film. The final show, Migritude, was 70 minutes long. Originally, we had over four hours of material, of text and different pieces and different performance segments, and we had to cut, cut, cut, cut and some of that was heartbreaking and brutal because some of my favorite pieces ended up on the floor, but it was a process of constant editing and rearranging and splicing and experimenting to find what was the final form and the best possible final show. (4) The publication of “Migritude” was driven by others who really wanted to see it on the page, and pushed the project forward to make it a book. And now that it’s published, it’s wonderful because it’s being translated more and more and it just crosses borders without me, which is fabulous. (4) 4 parts of the book: The first part is the text of Migritude, itself, the show. The second part is called “The Shadow Book” and it’s almost like the backstage conversation of each of the pieces in the first part, the theater script. It’s background story. Part three is called “The Making and Other Poems,” which are poems which didn’t make it into the script of Migritude, but are also part of the wider tapestry that Migritude grew out of, and part four is called “The Journey” and that includes the time line, which is the historical time line of migrations between the Asian and African Continents and two interviews with different scholars, one in Italy and one in the U.S., about Migritude, the making of it and the politics and the art that surround Migritude. (4)

AWARDS & HONORS -Her U.S. publishing debut, Migritude, based on her acclaimed one-woman show, has been published in the United States, Sweden and Italy. Migritude went to #1 on Amazon's bestsellers in Asian Poetry, and was a Seattle Times bestseller. It was short listed for Italy's Camaiore Poetry Prize and won Best Book Design in the American Design Awards. (10)

- -In 2012, she was selected as Kenya's poet for Poetry Parnassus, in the London Cultural Olympiad.

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THE AUTHOR Plain list, we need to do this for the other 2 works

Patel, Shailja. Migritude. New York: Kaya Press, 2010.

REFERENCES

EXTERNAL LINKS here we need to combine them all into one

Recognition

She was trained as a political economist, accountant and a yoga instructor. This caused her to focus her poetic skills on pieces that have received standing ovations on three continents.

Her work has been translated into twelve languages. She is a recipient of a Sundance Theatre Fellowship, an African Guest Writer Fellowship from the Nordic Africa Institute, the Fanny-Ann Eddy Poetry Award from IRN-Africa, the Voices of Our Nations Poetry Award, a Lambda Slam Championship, and the Outwrite Poetry Prize.

websites we can look at:

http://thenewinquiry.com/author/shailja-patel/ http://kaya.com/authors/shailja-patel/ http://fpif.org/art-activism-global-intersections-dialogue-shailja-patel/ http://arts.gov/audio/shailja-patel http://www.shailja.com https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aTpS4gjDss https://twitter.com/shailjapatel http://faculty.washington.edu/kendo/shailja.html http://www.kqed.org/arts/programs/spark/profile.jsp?essid=14612 http://creativetimereports.org/author/shailja-patel-1/ http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/shailja-patel#about https://www.facebook.com/shailja.patel.9883

Sent from email

TV AND ONLINE VIDEO:

► 4:17► 4:17 www.youtube.com/watch?v=lORq_yaMXrI Apr 18, 2014 - Uploaded by splitthisrock Shailja Patel performs "The Cup Runneth Over" at the 2014 Split This Rock Poetry Festival ...

TED@Vancouver: Drum Rider http://talentsearch.ted.com/video/Shailja-Patel-A-poem-for-Bi-Kid;TEDVancouver

Migritude Interview on San Francisco's Bay Sunday TV show: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0fGdQOORMc&feature=related

Gothenburg Book Fair, 2010: Shailja Patel, Nawal El Sadaawi and Ngugi wa Thiong'o http://babelbloggen.se/2010/09/stjarnspackat-i-babelfatoljen-shailja-patel-nawal-el-saadawi-och-ngugi-wa-thiongo/

"Eater of Death" performed at International Bioneers Conference http://www.youtube.com/user/Bioneers#p/u/13/p8bxP2AP5xQ

KQED Spark! documentary on Migritude (8 minutes): http://www.kqed.org/arts/programs/spark/profile.jsp?essid=14612

RADIO / PODCAST:

Poetry Parnassus, London Cultural Olympiad http://soundcloud.com/southbankcentre/poetry-parnassus-two (Shailja's interview: 8.50 - 13.30)

Bioneers Radio: "All Love Begins With Seeing" http://www.bioneers.org/radio/2011-radio-series/all-love-begins-with-seeing

NPR's New America Now (Migritude interview begins at 30:10) http://radiotime.com/program/p_193749/New_America_Now.aspx

KQED "Against The Grain: Migration and Empire" http://www.againstthegrain.org/tag-directory/shailja-patel

PRINT:

Kenya's Three Tribes http://mondediplo.com/2013/06/09kenya

1. KenyaRefuses

http://thenewinquiry.com/tag/kenya-refuses/

ICC Kenya Trials: David vs. Goliath http://allafrica.com/stories/201110281061.html

Seattlest: Shailja Patel Speaks Truth and Splits Fictions http://seattlest.com/2010/11/05/shailja_patel.php

Review of Migritude on Smithsonian's Book Dragon: http://bookdragon.si.edu/2010/10/26/migritude-by-shailja-patel/

Kenya One Year On http://www.pambazuka.net/en/category/features/53669

SHORT BIO CNN calls Shailja Patel “the people-centered face of globalization”. She connects the dots of global justice. An internationally acclaimed Kenyan poet, playwright, political commentator and activist, her performances have received standing ovations on four continents. Her first book, MIGRITUDE, was an Amazon poetry bestseller and a Seattle Times Bestseller. In 2011, the African Women's Development Fund named her one of Fifty Inspirational African Feminists. In 2012, she was chosen to represent Kenya at the Cultural Olympiad in London. www.shailja.com

FULL LENGTH BIO

CNN calls Shailja Patel “the people-centered face of globalization”. An internationally acclaimed Kenyan poet, playwright, activist, and public intellectual, her performances have received standing ovations on four continents. Trained as a political economist, accountant and yoga teacher, she uses text, voice, body, and critical thinking to delve for truth and dissect power.

Her US publishing debut, Migritude, based on her acclaimed one-woman show, has been published in the US, Sweden and Italy. Migritude went to #1 on Amazon's bestsellers in Asian Poetry, and was a Seattle Times bestseller - extremely rare for a poetry collection. In Italy, it was shortlisted for the Camaiore Poetry Prize. Migritude is taught in over 50 colleges and universities worldwide.

Patel has been African Guest Writer at Sweden's Nordic Africa Institute and poet-in-residence at the Tallberg Forum, Sweden’s alternative to Davos. She has appeared on the BBC World Service, NPR and Al-Jazeera. Her work has been translated into 16 languages. Honors include a Sundance Theatre Fellowship, a Creation Fund Award from the National Performance Network, the Fanny-Ann Eddy Poetry Award from IRN-Africa, the Voices of Our Nations Poetry Award, a Lambda Slam Championship, and the Outwrite Poetry Prize.

Patel is a founding member of Kenyans For Peace, Truth and Justice, a civil society coalition which works for an equitable democracy in Kenya. In 2011, the African Women's Development Fund named her one of Fifty Inspirational African Feminists for the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day, ELLE India Magazine selected her as one of its 25 New Guard Influencers, and Poetry Africa honored her as Letters To Dennis Poet, continuing the legacy of renowned South African anti-apartheid activist Dennis Brutus. In 2012, she was selected as Kenya's poet for Poetry Parnassus, in the London Cultural Olympiad. In 2014, her work featured in the Smithsonian Museum in Washington DC in the groundbreaking exhibition: "Beyond Bollywood: Indian Americans shape the Nation"

SHAILJA PATEL: ELECTRONIC MEDIA KIT

www.shailja.com https://twitter.com/shailjapatel

Represented by: The Lecture Bureau http://thelecturebureau.com/ For speaking engagements, please contact Katya Min Tel: + 1 510-452-9117 Toll Free: 888-834-6359

things from class: she does photography “What is the goal for people who read your book?” “Migritude is telling us what lies beneath the history… poetry goes beyond journalism. It goes beyond news. Because it enters us through the heart, through the gut. It lets us fell. And once we feel that unleashes energy for action”. (“Migritude”, Interview) look at this: "Migritude." YouTube. YouTube, 12 Dec. 2010. Web. 6 Apr. 2015. “The need for recognition and the longing for justice are the two forces that drive Shailja Patel’s work

Jcpolet (talk) 20:42, 8 April 2015 (UTC)

Desai, Gaurav. "Ambiguity Is the Driving Force or the Nuclear Reaction behind My Creativity." Jstor.org. Indiana University Press, n.d. Web. 2 Mar. 2015. <http%3A%2F%2Fwww.jstor.org%2Fstable%2F10.2979%2Freseafrilite.42.3.187%20.>. Jcpolet (talk) 03:40, 4 April 2015 (UTC) Jcpolet (talk) 03:41, 4 April 2015 (UTC) Jcpolet (talk • contribs) 20:05, 2 March 2015 (UTC)Jcpolet (talk) 03:41, 4 April 2015 (UTC) Jcpolet (talk) 03:40, 4 April 2015 (UTC) "Shailja Patel | Creative Time Reports." Creative Time Reports. Creative Time Reports, 2015. Web. 03 Apr. 2015. <http://creativetimereports.org/author/shailja-patel-1/>. Jcpolet (talk) 03:39, 4 April 2015 (UTC)

Jcpolet (talk) 21:15, 11 March 2015 (UTC) 2001:18E8:2:28D2:F000:0:0:297 (talk) 20:59, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

References

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Patel, Shailja. Migritude. New York: Kaya Press, 2010.

Powersjessica (talk) 19:59, 6 April 2015 (UTC)

Dlamini, Victor. "About / Press Kit." Shailja Patel: Poet. Kaya Press, n.d. Web. 08 Apr. 2015.

HopehouriganIU (talk) 20:57, 8 April 2015 (UTC)Hope Hourigan