Poetry in the Windows

Poetry in the Windows is a Placekeeping project that is part of Pangea World Theater's Lake Street Arts!- Circling program. Twenty-one poems are installed by Pangea in the windows or boarded up windows of businesses along Lake Street from Bde Maka Ska to the Mississippi.

This project connects poets, independent businesses, and the public together in mutual support. The Poems will will stay up through the December 31, 2021. Check out the list of locations and all the poets below.

Meet our amazing Guest Curators and POETS! Click on pictures for bios and see the full list of locations for each poem. Please support the independent businesses and check out the poems!

Watch Videos of the Poets!

Shá Cage

Shá Cage is a writer, activist, theater/film performer, and director raised in Mississippi and living in Minnesota who has been called a Change-maker, one of the leading artists of her generation, and a mover and maker. Her poetry has been featured in several publications including Blues Vision, The St. Paul Almanac and The Family Housing Fund’s Home series. Her plays include five solo works (U/G/L/Y, N-Word, Testify, Say Her Name, and Revelations), Khephra @ 2017 with Open Eye Theater, Hidden Heroes @ 2019 with Stages Theater, and a forthcoming commission about human trafficking titled Not For Sale. She was a co-founder of and co-writer of five plays with Mama Mosaic Theater and has been using art to elevate Black and Brown narratives through Tru Ruts for 20 years. Sha is the editor of the online anthology A Moment of Silence- 50 Black MN voices in a historical moment of transformation. ttps://blackmnvoices.com/

She is currently working on a web series and a street performance art project titled At the Corner Of. She enjoys gardening and is the proud mother of two.

Michael Kleber-Diggs

Michael Kleber-Diggs is a poet, essayist, and literary critic. His debut poetry collection, Worldly Things, won the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize and will be published by Milkweed Editions in June of this year. Among other places, Michael’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Great River Review, Water~Stone Review, Poem-a-Day, Poetry Northwest, Potomac Review, Hunger Mountain, Memorious, and a few anthologies. Michael is a past Fellow with the Givens Foundation for African American Literature, a past-winner of the Loft Mentor Series in Poetry, and the former Poet Laureate of Anoka County libraries. His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net and has been supported by the Minnesota State Arts Board and the Jerome Foundation. Michael is married to Karen Kleber-Diggs a tropical horticulturist and orchid specialist. Karen and Michael have a daughter who is pursuing a BFA in Dance Performance at SUNY Purchase.

Tish Jones

Founder and Executive Director of TruArtSpeaks, Tish Jones is a poet, performer, educator, and cultural producer from Saint Paul, Minnesota. She has performed in venues throughout the United States, including but not limited to Dance Place, Kaplan Theater, The Walker Art Center, CBGB, and more. Her work can be found in the Minnesota Humanities Center's anthology entitled,Blues Vision: African American Writing from Minnesota (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2015), the 2011 and 2013 Saint Paul Almanac, and the Loft Literary Center's Nation of Immigrants audio CD.

An Arts Matters Foundation Fellow, a Springboard for the Arts’ 20/20 Artist Fellows, and graduate fellow of the inaugural Intercultural Leadership Institute, Jones has always had a passion for bridging arts and culture, civic engagement, and youth development. Former Director of the Brave New Voices international youth poetry slam festival, her work explores the ways in which art can function as a tool for social transformation, liberation, and education. For more on her personal praxis, see Jones’ TEDxMinneapolis Talk on Spoken Word as a Radical Practice of Freedom.

Ellen Marie Hinchcliffe

Ellen Marie Hinchcliffe is a queer mama, auntie, poet, performer and filmmaker. She has performed widely in Minneapolis, MN including at Poetry and Pie, Late Nite Series, Pleasure Rebel at Bryant Lake Bowl, Naked Stages, The Calof Series at Patrick’s Cabaret and Bedlam Theater. Her work includes Walk Towards It (Editor) an anthology of resistance after the 2016 election, Spell For An End To Whiteness (And After Joy) performed with Jazz Drummer- Juma Essie at Queertopia 2018, Thought Woman- The Life and Ideas of Paula Gunn Allen (A full length documentary film) and Fierce Shimmer- Poems for Mama . She is the Program Director/Curator for Lake Street Arts!- Circling at Pangea World Theater. She lives two blocks from the Mississippi River with her Dad, her husband- Juma B. Essie and their amazing daughter. Ellen supports the Indigenous led movement to stop Line 3. More of her work at-
www.fierceshimmer.com

Marcie Rendon

Marcie Rendon, citizen of the White Earth Nation. Oprah Magazine’s 2020 list of 31 Native American Author’s to read. 2020 McKnight Distinguished Artist Award. 50over50 MN AAARP & Pollen Award. Rendon’s novel Girl Gone Missing, Cinco Puntos Press, is the second Cash Blackbear novel and was nominated for the Putnam’s Son’s Sue Grafton Memorial Award at the Edgars, 2020. Murder on the Red River (2017 Cinco Puntos Press) received the Pinckley Women’s Debut Crime Novel Award 2018 and the Western Writers of America Spur Award Finalist 2018 Contemporary Novel category. Rendon has non-fiction children’s books and four plays published. Diego Vazquez and Rendon received the Loft’s 2017 Spoken Word Immersion Fellowship for work with incarcerated women.

Arleta Little

Arleta Little is a writer and culture worker. Her literary work has appeared in Blues Vision: African American Writing From Minnesota and in The Saint Paul Almanac. She is a co-author along with Josie Johnson and Carolyn Holbrook of Hope in the Struggle: A Memoir about the life of Josie R. Johnson. Formerly the Executive Director of the Givens Foundation of African American Literature, she currently works as an Arts Program Officer and the Director of Artist Fellowships at the McKnight Foundation. She lives in the Longfellow neighborhood in Minneapolis.

Venus DeMars

Venus de Mars is a multidisciplinary artist and musician, best
known as a singer-songwriting transgender rock star and leader of the glam-punk trans-band Venus de
Mars & All the Pretty Horses.
Venus came out as transgender in 1988. A time when identifying as trans meant being classified as
having a mental perversion and living as an outcast. Her refusal to live a shadow existence, instead
embracing her uniqueness, complicated her musical and artistic career paths. She is now mid-process in

writing a memoir reflecting her thirty-year trans journey and place in this fast-changing, trans-
embracing-backlashing world where we now find ourselves.

Venus along with her wife Lynette Reini-Grandell, are also the subject of the award-winning [2004]
rock-documentary Venus of Mars by filmmaker Emily Goldberg.
Venus and her band are currently working on a new LP.
venusdemars.com
patreon.com/venusdemars
instagram.com/venusdemars
twitter.com/venusdemars
facebook.com/venus.demars

Sagirah Shahid

The Hub Bike Co-op 3016 Minnehaha Ave

Sagirah Shahid is a Black American Muslim poet, arts educator, and performance artist
from Minneapolis, Minnesota. She is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the
Loft Literary Center, the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, The Twin Cities Media
Alliance, and the Shangri La Museum of Islamic Art. Her debut collection of
poetry Surveillance of Joy is forthcoming from Half Mystic Press in 2021.

Ed Bok Lee

Ed Bok Lee is the author of three books of poetry, Real Karaoke People, Whorled, and Mitochondrial Night. www.edboklee.com

Fatima Camara

Fatima Camara is a writer and spoken word artist from Minneapolis, MN. She is the former programs associate and a program alumna of TruArtSpeaks, an arts-based nonprofit that cultivates literacy leadership and social justice through the study and application of spoken word and Hip Hop culture.
She is a recent graduate from Metropolitan State University with a degree in Professional Organizational Communications and Community Development & Organizing. Her chapbook, Yellowline was published through Akashic Book and the African Poetry Book Fund.
Camara’s passion for writing comes from her desire to highlight the stories of young first-generation Black people. She hopes for future first generations to have narratives they can reference and relate to through her work.
Social Media:
Facebook – Fatima Camara
Instagram – fatima.c1
Twitter – fatimac_1

May Lee Yang

May Lee-Yang is a writer, performance artist, and teacher who often uses pop culture and humor to interrogate race, gender, and identity. Her theater-based works include The Korean Drama Addict’s Guide to Losing Your Virginity and Confessions of a Lazy Hmong Woman. She has been featured on CNN’s United Shades of America with W. Kamau Bell and spoken at TEDx Minneapolis. Her work has been supported by grants from the Playwright Center McKnight Fellowship, the Bush Leadership Fellowship, the Jerome Foundation, the National Performance Network, the MN State Arts Board, The Loft Literary Center, and the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council. In 2016, she received an Ordway Sally Award for Arts Access. She is a founding member of F.A.W.K. (Funny Asian Women Kollective), a group that uses comedy to combat the invisibility and dehumanization of Asian women’s stories. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Minnesota.

Anaïs Deal-Marquez

Anaïs Deal-Marquez is a multidisciplinary artist and cultural organizer raised in México and the Upper Midwest. Her first poetry manuscript looks at memory, displacement, home, healing and migration. She has been published in POETRY Magazine, The BreakBeat Poets Volume 4: LatiNEXT, from Haymarket Books and elsewhere.

Louis Alemayehu

Louis Alemayehu is a poet, musician, educator and community elder. Born in Chicago of African and Native heritage, he developed artistically during the Black Arts Movement of the 1970s. Now a Minnesota resident, Louis is a founding member of Twin Cities music group Ancestor Energy–a group he’s performed with for more than 25 years

Amoke Kubat

At 70, I remain curious about self, the natural world, and the Sacred. Self taught, I use artmaking and writing to continue to define myself and hold a position of wellness in an America sick with inequalities and inequities.
For 35 years, I have been reclaiming an African Indigenous Spiritual sensibility. Every people were once indigenous to some place, with their own understanding of their relationships to the natural world and to all living things. Enslaved Africans were not settlers, immigrants or refugees. Our complicated Black experiences disenfranchises us from self and Nature. Our ways of knowing and deeply respecting Earth were disrupted, discouraged, devalued, and distorted. Reclaiming our Indigenous ways, our relationship to all living beings, is a pathway to healing.
I was born with the ability to “ see” and “hear” . I had no idea that others did not. I alarmed the grownups with my stories, messages and predictions. I was useful in finding lost things, I was a “lucky” for grownups who gambled at dog and horses races. The horses I liked always won.
I got into serious trouble a lot. My first oracle was a QUIJA Board given to me for my 9th birthday. I asked it “who was my aunt’s boyfriend” - in her husband’spresence. And a man’s man was revealed, as well as a scandalous truth! After I announced Walt Disney died a week before he did. I had noidea how I “knew” things. I began to censor myself. I didn’t want people to be scared of me. I didn’t want to be different.
Healing is work. Sustaining wellbeing is hard work. Social determinants impact health and wellbeing. Poverty, unequal access to healthcare, lack of education, stigma, and racism are underlying, contributing factors of health inequalities. Then there is lack of access to good food, rest and leisure. For Black people, the 400 years of racism, anti-blackness, and white supremacy have been health determinants.
I am an Iyanifa, priestess of Osayin, Yemoja and Olokun. Much of my work is about reconnecting people of African descent to the Primordial and First Worlds; the Realm of Spirits, Ancestors, Ori, and all of Nature’s domains.
I imagined and created YO MAMA’s Art of Mothering Workshops in 2010. This art based practice of wellness began as a drop in artspace for mothers who are artists, social justice activists and healers.
YO MAMA’s philosophy and practice is to empower mothers by disrupting the devaluation of women’s visible and invisible labor and increasing the recognition of the ART of Mothering that highlights the legacies of cultural maternal wisdom and know how that sustains healthy mothers, families and communities.
YO MAMA’S HOUSE is a demonstration project and model that many can learn from its MOTHER CENTERED, social gospel and grassroots approach to empowering women as mothers to do their mothering work and creating pathways to wellness for those overburdened,
under resources and sick and tired of being sick and tired. Healthy mothers raise healthy children, families and communities.
My first play, “ANGRY BLACK WOMAN & Well Intentioned White Girl” had two sold out performances at Intermedia Arts in 2016. It continues to tour in Minneapolis and rural Minnesota cities. As a Naked Stage Fellow, I wrote and performed my second play, “Old Good Pussy and Good Old Pussy” at the Pillsbury House Theater in 2020.

Rush Merchant

Rush Merchant, III is a native, and current resident of south Minneapolis. He is a graduate of Washburn Senior High School, and studied graphic design at Brown College, where he earned his Associates degree.
Merchant is a practicing musician, writer, and visual artist. He is releasing a new album of music and spoken word entitled “308” this summer. He can be reached via e-mail, Facebook, and Instagram.

rushm3448@gmail.com
https://www.facebook.com/rush.merchant3
www.instagram.com/rmerchant3rd

Clarence White

Clarence White is a writer, editor, typewriter poet, curator, arts administrator and a former bookseller at the Hungry Mind Bookstore. His publications are included in several editions of the Saint Paul Almanac, Suisun Valley Review and Public Art Review, and his essay “Smart Enough for Ford” appears in the anthology Blues Vision: African American Writing from Minnesota. He works in essay when he believes that conversation is possible and in poetry when he is less hopeful. He is the co-curator of the 2016 and 2017 Banfill-Locke Reading Series and Silverwood Park’s 2014 Art on Foot. He is a past Givens Foundation Retreat Fellow and was a finalist for mnartists.org’s flash fiction contest miniStories. He is the Associate Director of the East Side Freedom Library and lives in Saint Paul.

Anthony Ceballos

Anthony Ceballos is a poet, writer, and turkey sandwich enthusiast. In 2016 he was selected to be a Loft Literary Center Mentor Series mentee. His work has been featured in Yellow Medicine Review, Queer Voices: Poetry, Prose and Pride, Great River Review and elsewhere. He is a graduate from Randolph College's low residency creative writing program in Virginia. He lives, breathes and writes in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He can be found penning staff recommendations at Birchbark Books and Native Arts.

Angelica Bello

Ne notoka Angelica Bello Ayapantecatl. My name is Angelica. I am a student, daughter, and older sister, who was born in Zacatelco, Mexico and raised in Southside Minneapolis. I am who I am because of our communities and my mothers teachings. The arts have helped me get closer to my roots as well as have provided safe spaces for me, and I hope that through some words, I am able to do the same others. Tlazohcamati huel miac.

Kevin Reese

Kevin Reese is a key leader in the Twin Cities community, serving and utilizing his platform to make effective change. After his encounter with the judicial system, his eyes were opened to the inadequacies and injustice that permeate the system. As a result, his life’s mission is to rectify the detrimental effects of mass incarceration. One of the main ways he accomplishes this is by serving as former director of Criminal Justice at Voices For Racial Justice for over 6 years and founder and Executive Director of Until We Are All Free. Gifted with the talents of influential authorship and movement building, he became a recipient winner of the 2018 AWP intro Journals project for poetry published in the Hayden Ferry Review. Additionally, his writing talents have also been featured in Emily Baxter’s nationally acclaimed book We Are All Criminals . Ultimately, His work centralizes the topics of humanity, organizing, transformative movements, and ancestral visionary poetry.

Rosetta "Rosie" Peters

Rosetta Peters is a poet, an author, a public speaker, and an activist. She is of Yankton, Crow Creek, and Oglala descent. She is a single mother of six beautiful children, four daughters and two sons. Rosetta has had her work published in The Yellow Medicine Review. She is a procrastinator to the point of detriment and a lover of the natural world.

Sarojini T. Pokawa

Youth Poet with Tru Ruts Black Arts Insitute

Jalen Zaye Bailey

Youth Poet with Tru Ruts Black Arts Insitute

Jordan Vaslekey Bailey

Youth Poet with Tru Ruts Black Arts Insitute

Bills Imported Food 721 W Lake St- Fatima Camara

Lake & Bryant Cafe 821 West Lake St- Arleta Little

La Mexicana 1522 East Lake S- Spanish Translation- Louis Alemayhu

Ingebretsen's Scandinavian Gifts 1601 E Lake St- Anthony Ceballos

Pasteleria Gama 1703 E Lake St- Spanish Translation-Marcie Rendon

Taqueria El primo 2 at 1821 East Lake St- Spanish Translation- May Lee Yang

The Hub Bike Co-op 3016 Minnehaha Ave- Sagirah Shahid

Moon Palace Books 3032 Minnehaha Ave - Michael Kleber-Diggs,

Tish Jones, Sha Cage, Louis Alemayehu, Ellen Marie Hinchcliffe

Gandhi Mahal’s Space 27th Ave & Lake- Anais Deal-Marquez , Angelica Bello, Youth Poem, Amoke Kubat

East Lake Library 2727 E Lake St- Youth Poem on back window by Children’s Section

Himalayan Restaurant 2910 E Lake St- May Lee Yang

Merlins Rest Pub 3601 E Lake St- Ed Bok Lee and Kevin Reese

Longfellow Market 3815 E Lake St- Rush Merchant, Marcie Rendon

Hymie's Vintage Records 3820 E Lake St- Venus DeMars

Milkweed Cafe- Clarence White

Corazon 4646 E Lake St- Rosetta "Rosie" Peters

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Poetry is vital for sustaining us through such tender and dangerous times and is also a way to push conversations and ideas forward and back to ancient knowing. Poetry invites us to reconnect with our humanity and the humanity of others. There is intimacy and breath in the moment of stopping on the sidewalk and reading a poem. It also invites the public to reconnect with many local businesses and organizations on Lake Street that have survived such a hard year. This project acknowledges the way poetry/art can make space/hold space for what is missing, stolen, not yet imagined and must be present as we rebuild both the physical infrastructure of Lake Street and the cultural, spiritual and societal infrastructure of our streets, our blocks, our cities, our country, our home.

- Ellen Marie Hinchcliffe , Program Director for Lake Street Arts!- Circling and poet

“When I began to listen to poetry, it’s when I began to listen to the stones, and I began to listen to what the clouds had to say, and I began to listen to other. And I think, most importantly for all of us, then you begin to learn to listen to the soul, the soul of yourself in here, which is also the soul of everyone else.”

—Joy Harjo

Honoring our Circle of Many Realities

Pangea World Theater strives to build a just world by creating multi-disciplinary theater
that embodies decolonizing practices of solidarity, sustainability and equity.

Poetry in the Windows

La Mexicana 1522 East Lake S- Spanish Translation- Louis Alemayhu

Ingebretsen's Scandinavian Gifts 1601 E Lake St- Anthony Ceballos

Himalayan Restaurant 2910 E Lake St- May Lee Yang

Merlins Rest Pub 3601 E Lake St- Ed Bok Lee and Kevin Reese

Pangea World Theater gratefully acknowledges that we are on the sacred traditional lands of the Dakota people. It is an honor to live, work and create art and community alongside Dakota, Ojibwe and other Indigenous people in the Twin Cities.

Pangea World Theater
711 W Lake St, Ste 101
Minneapolis, MN 55408
(612) 822-0015

Poetry in the Windows

La Mexicana 1522 East Lake S- Spanish Translation- Louis Alemayhu

Ingebretsen's Scandinavian Gifts 1601 E Lake St- Anthony Ceballos

Himalayan Restaurant 2910 E Lake St- May Lee Yang

​

Merlins Rest Pub 3601 E Lake St- Ed Bok Lee and Kevin Reese