Saturday, May 22, 2021 on Zoom
6pm Tucson MT / PDT / 9pm ET
This event is ASL interpreted. Accessibility for the Deaf and hard of hearing community made possible with the skills of Letty Moran and Whitney Weirick, and by donors who support access.
Ticket sales are now closed.
Regular tickets $20 / Discounted tickets $15 / Donate-a-ticket $20
FREE for BIPOC and Deaf community members. Donate-a-ticket allows KPI to create access for all to be able to attend. Contact Tina@KorePress.Org to request a ticket.
You will be sent Zoom access instructions the morning of the event.
The Motherfield is a movement of radical mothers dedicated to telling complicated truths and listening. Story-coaching, knowledge, and support is shared by a coalition of storytelling alumni and staff who continue building connections and communities of care for mothers through story telling.
Kore’s tenth listening session in the MF Live series presents five amazing mothers who also are culture workers, scientists, mathematicians, folklorists, literary activists, labor poets, public servants, veterans, memoirists, and teachers. Women who are living FULLY and outloud. Spun off of Kore’s online essay series and newsletter feature, “Notes from the Motherfield,” the LIVE event presents storytelling by rad mamas across the US telling their unique truths in 10-minute pieces about the wild, gritty, gory, graceful, sacred, liberatory, and sometimes seemingly impossible encounters while mothering.
Help us celebrate this month of Mother’s Days with realtalk from our latest cohort of superheroes:
Allison Adelle Hedge Coke is mixed-Luso and came of age working in fields, factories, and waters. An environmental and labor poet, Hedge Coke was a sharecropper by the time she was mid-teens and continued manual labor until retraining for former fieldworkers nearing thirty years of age, after her disabilities eventually precluded continuation. For the past thirty years, she’s worked in literary activism, intervention, and bibliotherapy/narrative medicine. Hedge Coke teaches for Creative Writing and the School of Medicine (Distinguished Professor, UC Riverside), directs UCR Writers Week, Along the Chaparral: memorializing the enshrined, outreach project with K-12 schools, and is founder/organizer of the Literary Sandhill Crane Retreat. Hedge Coke’s most recent books are Burn and Streaming. Look at This Blue is forthcoming from Coffee House Press in 2022. An internationally awarded performing poet-writer, in 2021 she was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters and awarded the George Garrett Award from Associated Writing Programs.
Maribel Alvarez is the Jim Griffith Chair in Public Folklore at the Southwest Center, University of Arizona, where she also serves as faculty in the School of Anthropology and as Associate Dean for Community Engagement in the College of Social & Behavioral Sciences. In 2014 she founded the Southwest Folklife Alliance, which produces the annual Tucson Meet Yourself Folklife Festival and a variety of programs connecting traditional arts to community-based development throughout the US-Mexico border region. In 2018 the American Folklore Society awarded her the prestigious Americo Paredes Prize for “excellence in integrating scholarship and engagement with the people and communities one studies.”
Erika Liliana Gallo is a high school mathematics and science teacher, who is passionate about applied math, the power of data and empowerment through education. A transplant from Northern California, she attended The University of Arizona where she earned a Ph.D. in Hydrology and Water Resources, and the University of California at Davis where she studied Hydrologic Science and Environmental Biology. She continues to be involved in the academic research world through collaborative work in local water related issues. She was born and raised in central Mexico and immigrated to the U.S. at age 13, is the mother of two wonderful teenagers and two rescue dogs. Erika is intimately familiar with being over-stretched and overcommitted having completed a doctoral degree, and supported a partner through tenure simultaneously, as a mother. Yoga, cycling, hiking and writing help her center and balance, particularly as she deals with recent life changing health issues.
Arlethe Rios Morrison was born in Agua Prieta, Sonora, Mexico, immigrated to the United States with her parents, graduated from High School and joined the Army as a medic. After a deployment to Iraq and five years of service, she returned home to Arizona where she completed the process for naturalization, becoming a US Citizen. Arlethe is a poet and podcaster who has worked passionately in public service, including an appointment as Clerk of the Board in Cochise County as the youngest person and the only Mexican woman to ever hold that position in the State of Arizona. She has held multiple State appointments to Committees for Veterans affairs, is currently a constituent services and outreach representative for Senator Mark Kelly’s Office, and is working on her master’s in Public Administration. Arlethe lives in Vail, AZ with her husband, two children, and a border collie. She enjoys reading, writing, hiking, and occasionally is an amateur chef.
Rachel Zients Schinderman is a writer and teacher whose work has been published in The LA Times, Shondaland, and The Los Angeles Jewish Journal, to name a few. Her parenting column “Mommie Brain” ran in The Santa Monica Daily Press for two years and she is a frequent contributor to the show “Expressing Motherhood.” She currently lives in Culver City, CA with her two sons, two dogs, and one husband. She is working on a memoir.
Emcee, Tenecia Phillips
Tenecia is a klutzy, awkward, nerdy public librarian who grew up on the southside of Tucson and once dreamed of being a law enforcement officer but realized her calling was to save the world, one information need at a time. She is committed to increasing the presence of Black staff in libraries, creating inclusive spaces that serve and represent the community she lives in, and raising awareness about social justice issues. Becoming a mother was never on her list of goals she wanted to accomplish in her lifetime but recognizes that there is no greater gift that she could have been given than being blessed with the honor of raising, guiding, loving, supporting, and continually frustrating The Princess (her daughter).
Producer & Creator Lisa Bowden
Lisa works collaboratively with all the KPI teams as the KPI Director, and has developed a 28-years long list of titles, projects, and award-winning programming as a literary activist, social practice artist, collaborator, writer and intersectional feminist culture worker. She was named the University of Arizona English Department 2018 Alumni of the Year Award, a Maryann Campau Fellow for poetry from the University of Arizona Poetry Center, and a Woman on the Move Awardee from the YWCA. You can listen to an interview with Lisa on KXCI’s Artistories about Notes from the Motherfield LIVE here.
Thank you to the alumni storytellers who recommended some of the tellers: Travonne and Vivian Smith, Denise Uyehara; to Tenecia Phillips and Tina Howard who dedicate their precious time and attention to hold space for this MF magic to happen, and to all the women who said Yes to telling their truth. We are listening.
Gifted tickets create access for BIPOC and Deaf community members.
Ticket sales closed at midnight MT May 21.
The inspiration for Notes came from a phrase used by Joy Harjo on her blog decades ago: the motherfield refers to the imaginal, paradoxical colliding that happens only there and which requires an honest poetry to understand. Difficult truths exist side by side—between grief and beauty, ineffable and mundane, boundlessness and numbing routine is a sacred and profane space. We speak and listen into these stories to keep the narratives and knowledges about mothering complicated and real, to pierce the veil of perfection and isolation, and to make explicit our invisibilized labors.
Mamas of all kinds: We see you, we hear you, we appreciate you!
See more Motherfield info, bios, and links to videos of the stories here: October 25 2019, August 16 2019, April 12 2019. Individual videos are available from prior shows on a rolling basis. Screenings of some entire show will be available for periods of time for $10.
If you want to support this powerful storytelling initiative and the intersectional feminist work of Tucson’s Kore Press Institute, we appreciate your investment in the power of listening to women, here.
Interested in telling a story? Let us know! See the Motherfield FAQs.
KPI is an independent nonprofit working at the nexus of arts and justice dedicated to radically connecting communities and amplifying women’s voices through publishing, education, and social practice arts. Kore Press is one of four feminist presses in the country over 20 years old. Kore’s award-winning work has impacted communities locally and nationally for 28 years.