Previous Story
Youth storytelling through poetry workshop on June 1
-
- Jetnil-Kijiner
-
- Lin
The Northern Marianas Humanities Council is hosting a poetry workshop for high school and college students from Saipan, Tinian, and Rota. The workshop will be facilitated by poet Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner and photographer Daniel Lin.
Jetnil-Kijiner is a Marshallese poet, writer, performance artist, and climate activist. She is the founder of Jo-Jikum, an environmental non-profit organization in the Marshall Islands who teaches Pacific Studies courses at the College of the Marshall Islands. Jetnil-Kijiner has performed globally with organizations such as 350 Pacific, London’s Southbank Center, Poetry Parnassus, Youthspeaks Hawaii, UC Berkeley’s Poetry for the People, Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation and the Pacific Islander collective One Love Oceania. In 2014, she was selected to address the opening ceremony of the Climate Change Summit at the United Nations Headquarters in New York. At the summit, she performed a poem she wrote for her daughter entitled “Dear Matafele Peinem” that was followed by a standing ovation from the audience.
Photographer Daniel Lin is on a life-long journey to discover what it truly means to be a citizen of the world. His love for travel and focus on photojournalism has led him on extensive visits to the Pacific Islands and Asia working on issues pertaining to climate change, culture, and youth.
Lin is a regular contributor to National Geographic and the Associated Press. He currently resides in Hawaii where he is the Senior Research and Policy Specialist for Pacific Resources for Education and Learning (PREL).
The workshop is set for Wednesday, June 1, 2016, at the Northern Marianas College room D-1, from 1pm to 2:30pm. Its goals are to empower youth to learn and use media and storytelling as tools for discovering the value of place and adaptation in their places. Participants will learn how to raise awareness about important issues in the CNMI on a local, regional, and global platform.
The workshop is sponsored by the Northern Marianas Humanities Council through funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Interested participants are encouraged to register ahead of time to ensure that they get a seat. To register or for more information about the workshop, please call Eulalia V. Arriola at 235-4785 or send an e-mail to esvillagomez@gmail.com. The workshop is free of charge. (PR)
