Online Program: Transforming Grief into Gift
Join the Cathedral Center for Prayer & Pilgrimage for this online program, The Alchemy of Poetry: Transforming Grief into Gift with David Hassler.
Grief and praise are both expressions of love. Yet our contemporary culture does not readily offer us rituals to acknowledge our grief or to share it publicly. If we can learn to express ourselves and ritualize our grief, it can become medicine for our community. Join Wick Poetry Center director David Hassler through guided discussion and prompts, as we explore the creative process of transforming grief into gift through the imaginative and figurative language of poetry.
David Hassler directs the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University. In 2009, he cofounded Traveling Stanzas, a community arts project which creates illustrations in response to poems generated from community workshops in schools, healthcare facilities, libraries, senior centers, and veterans’ organizations. Hassler is the author or editor of ten books of poetry and nonfiction, including Dear Vaccine: Global Voices Speak to the Pandemic; Growing Season: The Life of a Migrant Community; and Speak a Powerful Magic: Ten Years of the Traveling Stanzas Poetry Project. His play, May 4th Voices: Kent State, 1970, based on the Kent State Shootings Oral History Project, was published by The Kent State University Press along with a Teacher’s Resource Book and was produced in 2020 as a national radio play by the WKSU NPR station. Hassler’s awards include Ohio Poet of the Year, the Ohioana Book Award, and the Carter G. Woodson Honor Book Award. His TEDx talk, “The Conversation of Poetry,” conveys the power of poetry to strengthen communities. In addition to his creative writing publications, he has co-authored articles on poetry, technology, and healing in the Journal of Palliative Medicine, the Journal of Technology and Teacher Education, and the Online Journal of Issues in Nursing.
Registration: $15, $7 students/seniors/limited income
Participants will receive an email with the Zoom prior to the start of the program.