{"title":"Mary Moore Easter","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"from-the-flutes-of-our-bones-subtitle-poems","title":"From the Flutes of Our Bones Subtitle: poems","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eIn her new collection, Mary Moore Easter opens the door on black worlds—home ground to some, less familiar to others—adjusting her register to the mood and subject at hand. In some poems she reacts with fury to the American political system, while in others she reflects on the richness of her heritage and depicts episodes in a life punctuated by personal loss and sustained by the renewal of love. Whether the mood is pensive, exuberant, or outraged, Easter's poems offer us glimpses of black culture burnished with a fresh eye, replacing time-worn stereotypes with lived experience, wit, and craft.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eIn one poem she describes the pleasure her father took pronouncing the syllables of Chaucer's Middle English; in another, with an entirely different tone, she imagines herself driving through the state of Virginia with recent victims of racist crimes at her side and in the back seat. There are love poems and poems of rage directed toward patronizing colleagues. Music rumbles consistently through pages that flicker with the harshness of her racially restricted existence, establishing a rich and beautiful matrix of emotions.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003ePoet Jericho Brown notes that the poems \"travel, dance, and strut from Richmond, Virginia, to Sierra Leone and back,\" while Patricia Smith describes the collection as \"a complex road map of Black memory and tradition.\"\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eIn addition to \u003cem\u003eFrom the Flutes of Our Bones\u003c\/em\u003e,\u003cstrong\u003e Mary Moore Easter\u003c\/strong\u003e is the author of three other books of poetry. Her poems have been published in Poetry, Prairie Schooner, The Christian Century, Water~Stone, SoFloPoJo and several anthologies. Raised in a musical household, her love of poems and the poetic voice persisted alongside her adult career as an independent dancer\/choreographer and Founder and Director of Carleton College's dance program. Her awards include: Artist Initiative Grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board (2020), Pushcart Prize-nomination, Bush Artist Fellowship in Choreography, multiple McKnight Awards in Interdisciplinary Arts, The Loft Literary Center's Creative Non-Fiction Award, and residencies at Ragdale and The Anderson Center. Easter holds a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence and an M.A. in Music for Dancers from Goddard.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Nodin Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":41321695641750,"sku":"9781947237308","price":17.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0477\/8731\/1254\/products\/img_proxy_a2f8d672-f40a-4ea0-a179-baa4f66ad1fe.jpg?v=1642162535"},{"product_id":"the-way-she-wants-to-get-there-telling-on-myself","title":"The Way She Wants to Get There: Telling on Myself","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe author traces her development as a dancer during of the decade between 1968 and 1979, a pivotal era in Black\/white relations, women's rights, and other significant developments in social traditions. The sanctions that thread through the American fabric to limit black lives can be seen in the description of her journey, which looks forward to her eventual success but focuses more often on her difficulties in balancing the aspirational needs of her \"trickster body\" with the responsibilities of family life on a small-town campus. Meditative interludes take us back to Easter's upbringing in Richmond, Virginia, in the midst of a highly talented family of musicians and educators, and the recollections of her elder family members take us back to the era of slavery and abduction. Dance enthusiasts and anyone familiar with the highly charged emotional climate of a modern dance troupe will enjoy her descriptions of joining, managing, and creating dances for such a group.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eMary Moore Easter\u003c\/strong\u003e is the author of four poetry books, \u003cem\u003eFrom the Flutes of Our Bones\u003c\/em\u003e (2021); \u003cem\u003eThe Body of the World,\u003c\/em\u003e Minnesota Book Award in Poetry Finalist, (2019), \u003cem\u003eWalking from Origins\u003c\/em\u003e, and \u003cem\u003eFree Papers\u003c\/em\u003e: poems inspired by the testimony of Eliza Winston, a Mississippi slave escaped to freedom in Minnesota in 1860 (2022). Her poems have been published in \u003cem\u003ePoetry, Prairie Schooner, The Christian Century, Water~Stone, SoFloPoJo\u003c\/em\u003e and other publications as well as several anthologies. She gives numerous public readings in Minnesota and from coast to coast. Her work has also been used as texts for art songs —she was Poet-in-Residence for the 2022 Source Song Festival—and on library-sponsored poetry trails.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBorn during segregation, in Petersburg, Virginia, to parents on the faculty of Virginia State College (now University), Mary Moore Easter was as immersed in their artistic and intellectual interests as she was in the limitations that segregation imposed on her Black world. Her adult career as an independent dancer\/choreographer and founder and director of Carleton College's dance program overlapped with writing as a Cave Canem Fellow at the foundation for African American poetry. Her awards include: Artist Initiative Grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board (2020), Pushcart Prize-nominations, Bush Artist Fellowship in Choreography, multiple McKnight Awards in Interdisciplinary Arts, The Loft Literary Center's Creative Non-Fiction Award, and residencies at Ragdale and The Anderson Center. Easter holds a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence and an M.A. in Music for Dancers from Goddard. She retired from formal teaching with the title: Rae Schupack Nathan Professor of Dance and the Performing Arts Emerita.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn 2022, Carleton College named the new studios in the Weitz Center for Creativity to honor her legacy: the Mary Easter Dance Studios.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"In 'The Way She Wants to Get There,' Mary Moore Easter has penned a powerful, absorbing memoir of her decade-long journey toward becoming the dancer\/choreographer for whom the dance studio at Carleton College would eventually be named. Her poetic voice comes through on every page, imbuing this remarkable work with characters and images that linger long after the final page is turned.\" - \u003cstrong\u003eCarolyn Holbrook\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\" 'The Way She Wants to Get There' narrates a riveting life of courage, sass, adventure, and attainment. As agile with language as she is with what she terms her 'trickster body,' Mary Moore Easter gives the reader a visceral jolt of her experience as a Black woman who finds her dance, and a whole lot more. Easter's memoir engages us in the process that a professional dancer must undergo to braid the physicality of an athlete with the eloquence of a poet. From her battles to master technique to her struggles to attain agency and artistry against considerable odds, Easter discloses how dance helped her to find a sense of wholeness and belonging. Along the way she embeds us in her family history, the civil rights movement, and a voyage of discovery that led from the segregated South to the seemingly placid plains of Northfield, Minnesota.\" - \u003cstrong\u003eLinda Shapiro\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Mary Hardie Moore Easter is the consummate artist\/poet\/musician\/writer. I delighted in her brilliant phrasing and memorable descriptions. It was a joy to enter the settings, delight in the chronicling, be carried away by the rhythms, and marvel at her skill in, not so much telling a story, as painting pictures and dramatizing events.\" - \u003cstrong\u003eDaryl Cumber Dance\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Nodin Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42141288726678,"sku":"9781947237421","price":19.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0477\/8731\/1254\/products\/9781947237421ita.jpg?v=1663707719"},{"product_id":"dancing-on-the-precipice-poems","title":"Dancing on the Precipice: poems","description":"\u003cp\u003eMary Moore Easter's new collection, her fifth, chronicles the dramatic aftermath of open-heart surgery and the removal of a life-threatening aneurism. She recounts episodes in her healing journey and gradual recovery, and celebrates the sources of inspiration that helped her to return to her dancing self, including a visit with family to ancestral West Africa. Several of the poems are accompanied by QR codes, by means of which readers can listen to Easter sing her songs, reviving the artistic link between her spoken ancestry and the legacy alive in her children and grandchildren. Brash political events also burst onto the page as the larger world becomes immersed in fear and chaos far greater than the threat to the poet's own individual survival. But in the end, this collection celebrates the life and the love that renewed health can make possible. These poems sing, dance, and love, on the edge of the eternal precipice that defines our lifespan.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Nodin Press","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":51484123988285,"sku":"9781947237711","price":17.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0477\/8731\/1254\/files\/9781947237711ita.jpg?v=1773249339"}],"url":"https:\/\/itascabooks.com\/collections\/mary-moore-easter.oembed","provider":"Itasca Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}