Aldon Nielsen, "Tray"
LISTEN TO THE SHOW
Aldon Nielsen, William J. Harris, Tyrone Williams, hosted by Al Filreis, convened in the Arts Café of the Kelly Writers House, before a live audience, to discuss Aldon’s poem “Tray.” There are 29 sections in the poem; the group discussed the first 6. In the book titled Tray, published by Make Now Press in 2017, the title poem takes up the first 37 pages; the sections we discussed run to page 14. Usually, of course, we play an audio recording of the poem from we’re about to discuss as archived in PennSound, but on this day, because we had the honor of Aldon’s presence we asked him to perform those sections.
November 29, 2023
Sing Our Rivers Red
Tanaya Winder
Tanaya Winder is from the Duckwater Shoshone, Pyramid Lake Paiute, and Southern Ute nations. She is a poet, performer, and activist and is a co-founder of Sing Our Rivers Red (SORR), a collective of indigenous artists, poets, and activists working to help raise awareness around the crisis faced by indigenous women in Canada and the US. According to the Department of Justice, “Native American women are 2.5 times more likely to experience assault in their lifetimes than women of other races. One in three will be raped in their lifetime, and on some reservations women are murdered at a rate ten times higher than the national average.”