Shanta Lee, award-winning author and visual artist, will accept the Abel Meeropol Social Justice Writing Award and give the keynote address at the WriteAngles Conference on April 6, 2024, at the Northampton Center for the Arts.
Ms. Lee was the 2020 recipient of the Arthur Williams Award for Meritorious Service to the Arts and a gubernatorial appointee to the Vermont Humanities Council Board of Directors. Her 2023 poetry collection, illustrated by Alan Blackwell, Black Metamorphoses, explores the Black psyche, body, soul, through inversion and brazen confrontation of work that has shaped Western civilization in what she calls a conversation, interpretation, and interrogation of Ovid. It was a finalist for the Hudson Prize, shortlisted for the Cowles Poetry Book Prize and longlisted for the Idaho Poetry Prize. Her 2021 collection, GHETTOCLAUSTROPHOBIA: Dreamin of Mama While Trying to Speak Woman in Woke Tongues won the 2020 Diode Press full-length book prize and the 2021 Vermont Book Award. Her website is Shantalee.com.
The Abel Meeropol Social Justice Writing Award, which honors a writer whose work promotes social and political change through literature, is partially funded from royalties from Abel Meeropol’s iconic anti-lynching song, “Strange Fruit.”
The WriteAngles Conference, a project of Straw Dog Writers Guild, offers panels, roundtable discussions, and workshops, as well as opportunities for networking and meeting with a literary agent. Conference organizers worked with writers across the four western Massachusetts counties to revive the conference, which had served the western Massachusetts literary community for over 30 years until cancelled in 2020 due to the pandemic. The new conference focuses on writing that illuminates the complexities of our world, creates dialogue, incites change, and heals wounds. Sessions include “Beyond the Book,” “Who’s a Writer anyway?” “Writing in Community,” “Naming our Roots: Generating Poems from the Cultural Language of Our Experiences,” and “Writing the Urgent Now.”
Program and registration information is available at https://writeanglesconference.com/2024-conference/program/.