Join California College of the Arts for an intimate afternoon with acclaimed poet and cultural worker, Kathy Engel in conversation with CCA fine arts graduate student Jasmine Narkita Wiley. Using Engel's "Dear Inheritors" as a springboard, they will explore how creative practices are inherently communal endeavors - even in our most solitary moments at the desk.

Drawing from decades of working at the intersection of art and activism, Engel, founder with a group of women, and first director of MADRE, an international women's human rights organization, will share insights on grounding creative work in social movements. Their conversation will delve into how our lived experiences and artistic practices generate new theoretical frameworks. Through personal narrative and dialogue, they’ll also discuss what it means to "live inside the contradictions" and how these tensions can become generative spaces for transformation. 

Kathy Engel is a poet, essayist, teacher, organizer, and cultural worker. Her writing has been widely anthologized, appearing in numerous journals including the Academy of American Poets Poem a Day. She’s spoken internationally on the relationship between art/culture and social change. Her newest book of poems, Dear Inheritors, was released in June, 2024. Previous books include Ruth’s Skirts, poems and prose, the anthology We Begin Here: Poems for Palestine and Lebanon, co- edited with Kamal Boullata, The Kitchen accompanying the art of German Perez, the chapbook, Banish The Tentative, and The Lost Brother Alphabet, 2020. An excerpt from one of her poems in the anthology appeared as graffiti in artist Jenny Holzer’s recent exhibition at The Guggenheim while two stanza’s were projected onto the Guggenheim wall alongside work by Mahmoud Darwish, Seamus Heaney, Anne Carson, Yehuda Amichai and others. She is Associate Arts Professor in the Department of Art & Public Policy, Tisch School of the Arts, NYU. www.kathyengelpoet.com.