Our final episode highlights two things: the beauty of weirdos & your human hope.

Project organizer, Professor Alexandra Juhasz, penned these fragments, anonymously, at a Fake News Poetry Workshop held at the Toronto home of that workshop’s facilitator, Professor T.L. Cowan. Later, at another workshop held within an NYU Performative Writing class and led by Professor Barbara Browning, these words were transformed into a song—by Barbara—quite unaware of who had written them.

Two fragments of poetry formed a crossroads between T.L., Barbara, Alex, and others. And, the gifts of time, thought, place, art, and care—so live in this episode—also allow it to model HardTruth #23 from the online primer on digital media literacy: "galvanize people at the crossroads of cinema and community." These words were originally penned by The United States of Cinema, a collective that organized a National Event Day in April 2017. The movie 1984 was screened across the U.S, as a way to speak against fake news, totalitarian rule, and censorship. 

At the intersections of moving images, artmaking, and ways of being together, we can and often do manifest power and hope. Poetry, songs, performances, movies, parties, and workshops are places where truth intersects with our knowledge, disdain, and plans for each other and the internet.

This podcast has been another crossroads for people, poetry, community, criticism, activism and care. The generous, volunteer contributions of scores of poets, scholars, and activists allowed for the many connections that have been built here in the summer of 2020. The stellar efforts of director and editor, Matthew Hittle, social media specialist, Julia Gill, and copyeditor, Gavin McCormick have provided the steady pulse that underwrote and enabled it all. Thank you for listening!

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This emergency episode was made quickly during a time of uprising following the killing of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and countless other African Americans by police.

Poets, educators, and friends Chet’la Sebree and Margaret Rhee worked with me on two Fake News Poetry workshops on race and the media. The first was in May 2018, with poets of color in Brooklyn; the second, in November at the home of Claudia Rankine and John Lucas, where we translated some of the poems written in Brooklyn into video-poems.

Now, in a new moment of insurrection and distance, they reflect upon poetry, media, race, safety, and beauty. Each shares a poem. Then they speak together. “How do we render humanity?” Chet’la asks Margaret. By co-articulating, gently and powerfully, the relations between place, politics, poetry, and power.

In so doing, my colleagues also enact the #100th, and final, HardTruth from my online primmer, a call to poetry: “speak and spell, teach and tell, count and swell.” These simple rhymes set forth the hard ideas and warm feelings that unroll here, spoken with intimacy and care by two women of color poets and teachers. Speak and spell about love. Teach and tell about friendship. Count and swell our writing and conversation in a time of continuing distance and proximity, all in honor of a very simple truth: Black Lives Matter.

Join us in the change!

Reach out with questions or content @ 100hardtruths@gmail.com.

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#BlackLivesMatter

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In this episode, we rely on poetry to resist how we are framed. A HardTruth of the same name was written for my online primmer on digital media literacy by the writer Hugh Ryan. In 2017 he offered up words of our queer heritage as one response to the dishonorable and controlling vernaculars of the internet.

Hugh believes that we are “hampered because we fight using language that is stacked against us.”

So, he provides something else, the poetry and wisdom of our elders. Adrienne Rich, David Wojnarowicz, and Audre Lorde. Three young people in my family read selections of their writing, learning and reading with us and from our elders. The episode ends with Hugh’s reading of Lenin D’s poem written at a Fake News Poetry workshop with the disabled writer’s troupe, Poets of Course: one more voice, or is that two, in a noble legacy of frame-breakers we have listened to and learned from here:

I felt I was in the moment of silence because I was shy, a little bit social

and my identity has been changing for the better and worst of me.

I was never rejected not because I have a disability,

I just didn't want to talk to people in high school.

Poems teach, and in so doing prove that art-making, connected to our experiences of identity, community, family, disability, and truth, can be one small part of a shared way out of, or perhaps through, our terrible troubles. So, change the internet with us! Engage in art answers to phony questions by volunteering to read a poem, a HardTruth, or your own response. Organize your own Fake News Poetry Workshop.

Reach out with questions or content @

100hardtruths@gmail.com

Twitter: @100HardTruths

Instagram: @100HardTruths

YouTube: 100 Hard Truths

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.