3. the storytellers of ramallah

In the summer of 2014, I received a CEC Arts Link Award to go to Ramallah, Palestine to conduct creativity workshops with teenage members of Ashtar Theater. The theater’s founding director, Iman Aoun had been in Santa Fe the previous year, taken one my writing workshops, and been moved enough by the experience to invite me to Palestine and suggest this grant opportunity.

I spent two intense months in Ramallah and East Jerusalem, an experience that I chronicled in a feature article for Al Jazeera America “The storytellers of Ramallah” (August 2014), on the blog, Land Out Loud, and in a play, Are You Safe (2014) published in Sukoon magazine. The writing that the Ashtar students produced in my workshops was also published in Sukoon; we co-produced a video, Moment in Ramallah that was selected to the online No Passport Theater Festival, (2015) curated by Caridad Svich.