videos cycle through the entire reading

Black Lives Matter

“Dear America: Telling the World We Lived” is a project of the Ventura County Poetry Project in response to the loss of hundreds of thousands of elders during this ongoing pandemic. With numbers this huge, it’s hard to grasp the loss of so many voices, so many irreplaceable human beings who have each faced challenges in their lives and are the holders of their personal history which is also the history of our nation. We’ve gathered a group of elder poets and story-tellers to speak about significant moments in their lives.  Here, we have briefly interwoven their poems and stories.  Please explore the fuller versions in the links below.  Our goal is to retain the wisdom of the aged in a culture that devalues aging.  As is right and proper, we are striving to honor those we have lost.  We want to share this to as many people as possible, including high school teachers and their students, who have suffered greatly during this time. We hope that the youth will write poems and stories about their own experiences and that, when it is safe, we can bring the groups together for shared readings.  This project has been made possible with support from California Humanities at calhum.org.