Extremely Long Blogs from Yellowgurl.com

May 2013 Gigs: NYC, Seattle, MA, Santa Barbara, & Chicago!

Hope to catch you if you’re in the area, and spread the word to your peeps :)

THURS. May 2: NYC:  LitWorld Gala, Metropolitan Pavilian, Metropolitan Suite, 123 W. 18th St. 2nd Floor, 6:30 PM-9:30 PM. Tickets are currently sold out. To support LitWorld: http://www.litworld.org.

WED. May 8: Des Moines, WA: “Sheroes Performance & Panel Discussion,” Highline Community College, Building 8, Mount Constance/Olympus, 10:00 AM-11:30 AM, Free, http://multiculturalservices.highline.edu/AAPImonth.php.

SAT. May 11, Gill, MA:  Northfield Mount Hernon, 8:00 PM, Closed to the public.

THURS. May 16. 13: Santa Barbara, CA: “An Evening of Spoken Word with Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai,” University of California - Santa Barbara, The Coffee Cat, 1201 Anacapa St., 7:30 PM, http://mcc.sa.ucsb.edu/Calendar/index.aspx.

SAT. May 18: Seattle, WA: OneAmerica Annual Celebration Featuring Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai, The Westin Seattle, 1900 5th Ave., For info and tickets: http://www.weareoneamerica.org/2013-annual-celebration.

MON. May 20: NYC: Asian American Legal Defense & Education Fund (AALDEF) Revolutionizing Asian American Immigrant Stories on the East Coast (RAISE) Event Re: Immigration Reform, Culture Project, 45 Bleecker St., 7:30 PM, More Details to Come! For info on RAISE:
http://aaldef.org/raise.html.

TUES. May 21: Chicago, IL: Young Chicago Authors WordPlay, Workshop + Open Mic + Feature, 1180 N. Milwaukee, 6:00 PM, Free. For Info on YCA:
http://youngchicagoauthors.org.

WED. May 22: Chicago, IL: DePaul University Cultural Cafe, “The Cursor Blinks Back: Spoken Word Poetry & Performance in the Digital Age” Workshop, 11:20 AM-12:50 PM, Student Center 314AB, “OMG. LOL. SMH.” Spoken Word Performance, Cortelyou Commons, 2324 N. Fremont, 6:00 PM-7:30 PM, http://studentaffairs.depaul.edu/cip/culturalcafes.html. 

To book a performance, workshop, or other event on my Summer 2013-Spring 2014 tour or beyond, contact: booking@yellowgurl.com.

origins

by Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai

read
 
from the Middle English  reden;
the Old English raeden - to counsel -
 
the Dutch raden; German raten;
Old Norse ratha;
 
which leads back to the Sanskrit radhnoti
- one achieves 

eyes to page, muscles of cornea
tighten and release
 
a flowering of light
come to focus
 
the center

these strokes on a page
they do mean something
 
how to decipher a life?
 
i will never be in your skin
i will never love what you alone have loved
 
yet
 
this pen
these fingers
this mouth
these eyes

scan the texture of the hieroglyph, the ideogram
 
sky above mountains
a great flock of birds
the skeleton bones of a fish

drawn into an alphabet
characters able to be held in hand
arranged on the page
 
without written language
there has always been language

yet

with written language
emerges a bridge
 
an alphabet with all its colors and combinations
come sound, come image, come worlds
that are far beyond where we are now

we can be the unknown future
put your dream beside mine
 
we can read and sing each other the stories
of what has made us human time and time again,
 
through death, through evil, through destruction,
through survival, through creation
 
captured on the page
 
another sun rises, mists evaporate back to sky
it is another day, brilliant in color
 
let us read, write, speak these words

———————————————————————————————-

(New poem I wrote to perform at LitWorld’s gala tonight in NYC. As always feel to fwd/re-post :) To check out their wonderful work re: global literacy, go to http://www.litworld.org.)

sexy subterfuge and other ways to be a feminist in the 21st century

this article right here…

and this article right here…

click on the jpg’s to read. #feminism #2013 #discuss

SAY YOU HEARD MY ECHO Kickstarter is LAUNCHED!!!

Hey kitty kats:

I swear, I have lots of interesting blogs that I’ve been meaning to write from my time at the Congressional Hunger Center to “Say You Heard My Echo” at DC Hip Hop Theater Fest to performing at the Campus Progress National Conference where Dick Durbin spoke about why he wrote the DREAM Act as well as human rights group Resolve sounding off re: what they learned from the explosion of KONY 2012…

Plus awesome events I’ve gone to like “Ai Wei Wei: Never Sorry,” hearing the poetry of imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Liu Xiaobo and seeing the amazing Taiwanese Chio-Tian Arts & Drumming group in NYC -

But I’m currently rehearsing, revising, producing “SAY YOU HEARD MY ECHO” which will go up in NYC Sept. 12-16, 2012, (plus working on a short film / screenplay project - more on that soon!) - so things have been a little hectic!

All that being said, we just launched our Kickstarter yesterday, and I couldn’t be more thrilled with the fact that we’re over 11% funded in our first day online :) We need to raise $7,110 more over the next 28 days!

If you can contribute, spread the word, like, re-blog, post, share, watch the vid, we’d be so very grateful! Help us bring this important piece of spoken word poetry theater to its full life on stage this September :)

To contribute to our Kickstarter, go to: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/623137736/say-you-heard-my-echo-nycs-locating-the-sacred-fes

THANK YOU SO SO MUCH!!!