Following her 2012 TEDxGreenville talk, nationally renowned poet, Glenis Redmond, was selected as The Peace Center’s Poet-in-Residence, a position designed to focus on using poetry to engage Greenville citizens in creative expression.
One of her first projects was Peace Voices: The literary and performance poetry branch of The Peace Center’s Peace Outreach Program. The mission is to provide a platform for creative expression through writing and performing poetry with young and mature writers, while raising the awareness and appreciation of poetry in the greater community. Peace Voices presents poetry readings in the fall and in winter for middle school and high school students. Students regularly meet in the Center’s new community engagement space, Ramsaur Studio, to discuss, workshop and grow participants’ page and stage crafts. Virtually all Peace Voices gatherings are FREE and open to students and the community interested in poetry. Glenis cherishes being back in Greenville, South Carolina because this is where her writing interest began – at Woodmont Junior & Senior High School in Ms. Sergeant’s (now Mrs. Allen) English Class. Glenis knows the power of giving young people the tools to strengthen their own creative expressions.
Last year, in conjunction with The Dick Riley Institute, Glenis led a “Voices of Diversity” workshop for adults in which almost 30 community members wrote autobiographical poems, which were read on the Gunter Theatre stage. The workshop will be hosted again this spring by The Peace Center’s Peace Voices.
In addition to her community engagement work, Glenis has also received some notable awards since her 2012 talk on the TEDxGreenville stage, including the Denny Plattner Appalachian Heritage Award for Outstanding Poetry (2013), the Mountain Express Best of WNC for Poetry (2013) & Hall of Fame for winning this honor for the last decade and the Leo Twiggs Arts Leaders Scholarship for 2013 granted by the SC Arts Commission and the Women Making History Award granted by the Greenville Cultural Exchange Center. She also placed in the Kakalak Poetry Contest (2013) and was published in Kakalak, a collection of poetry and art from those living in or writing about the Carolinas. Her winning entry is titled, “”I’m Fly” a tribute for Greenville’s own Peg Leg Bates.
Glenis calls herself Bicarolinian, making her home in Greenville (SC) and in Charlotte (NC). She is also the Poet-in-Residence at the State Theatre in New Brunswick, NJ, for two months out of the year. During her New Jersey residency, Glenis conducts performances and workshops in schools, colleges and prisons. She has crafted a program that takes high school seniors to interview senior citizens about their lives and then craft poems read in a communal setting. The learning goes both ways. Glenis continues to travel all over the United States, bringing the healing art of poetry to all who will listen.
Please listen to Glenis’s 2012 talk, Poetry As Healer.
To read some of the student poems, click on the link to Peace Voices. Upcoming Peace Voices Teen Events that you may wish to attend are What’s Love Got to Do with It Slam? at Ramsaur Studio, February 15, 4-6 pm, and on February 16 a Poetry Reading at the Gunter Theatre from 2-4 pm.
With this post, one in a series of past TEDxGreenville presenter updates, we hope to answer questions that we’ve asked a lot and have heard from many of you, So, they shared their idea/performance, what then? What have they been up to? Where are they now?
