"Light of the August Moon" author Terri Lyons Joins Us

04/15/17 • 89 min

In this episode, we're joined by featured guest Terri Lyons. A Philadelphia native, Terri is an award-winning storyteller, actress, keynote speaker, and author of eight books, including her latest, "Light of the August Moon," a collection of short stories of modern history with a poetic twist, stories of the American experience spanning the Roaring Twenties through the Disco Seventies. Among other things, we'll discuss Terri's process of researching and writing "Light of the August Moon." What's fascinating is the fact that many of the most controversial and/or pivotal events of American history took place during the month of August. She writes, "There is nothing new about trying times...History occurs every month of the year, but so many events occured or culminated in the month of August. August, the month when all things ripen." This work should be required reading by all in the age of Trump. We'll delve into the ways in which her work - and its references to and critiques of America's painful yet resilient past - cuts through collective psychic denial about racial and social injustice, promotes a level of introspection that can be healing and restorative, and raises our collective consciousness and understanding about history and its multiple impacts. I hope you'll join us for what will be a lively and thought-provoking episode of #VoicesForRacialHealing.

Previous Episode

Guest & TEDx Speaker Charles Sutton Asks, "What Can You Do, With What You Know?"

Maker education has the potential to empower all individuals to think critically about complex systems and encourage them to be active participants in building and shaping the future they want. In this episode, we are joined by Charles Sutton, a librarian and aspiring public intellectual. Through his professional and personal work, he is committed to developing human agency and structural change where needed. His interests include early and emergent literacy, critical making, and maker education/empowerment. Charles is a thinker and a tinkerer. The following quote from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man sums it up best: “Call me, since I have a theory and a concept, a “thinker-tinker.” In 2015, Charles spoke at TEDx Evansville on the topic "Maker Education: Empowering individuals to make a better world." He discusses how he transformed his home into an urban ecological experiment – implementing workable alternatives to current practices that threaten our water, energy and food security. Can makers of all stripes facilitate healing and restoration of urban communities? Can they - we, because we all can make something - help to ameliorate the deep-seated wounds to communities caused by racism, sexism, ableism, ageism, economic disinvestment, etc.? We will talk about this and much more in this episode. Please join us!