Reading & Panel: We Are Meant to Rise (Common Ground)

Common Ground Meditation Center co-hosts this reading and panel discussion of We Are Meant to Rise.

In this significant collection, Indigenous writers and writers of color bear witness to one of the most unsettling years in the history of the United States. Essays and poems vividly reflect and comment on the traumas we endured in 2020, beginning with the arrival of the COVID-19pandemic crisis, deepened by the blatant murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers and the uprisings that immersed our city into the epicenter of passionate, worldwide demands for justice. We Are Meant to Rise lifts up the astonishing variety of BIPOC writers in Minnesota. In inspired and incisive writing these contributors speak unvarnished truths not only to the original and pernicious racism threaded through the American experience but also to the deeply personal, in essays about family, loss, food culture, economic security, and mental health.Their call and response is united here to rise and be heard.

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Here are the readers for this book event:

Arleta M. Little is the current Board Chair of Common Ground. Arleta joined the Loft Literary Center as executive director in late 2021. Prior, Arleta spent eight years directing the McKnight Artist Fellowships, a nearly $3M program providing unrestricted support for artists and culture bearers across 15 creative disciplines in Minnesota; before that, she served as the executive director of the Givens Foundation for African American Literature, working for more than 15 years as an organizational development consultant providing strategic planning, program evaluation, and grant writing services to Minnesota organizations. Her essay “Life and Death in the North Star State,” published in Water-Stone Review Vol. 24, was nominated for a 2022 Pushcart Prize. Her work is included in We Are Meant to Rise: Voices for Justice from Minneapolis to the World; This Was 2020: Minnesotans Write About Pandemics and Social Justice in a Historic Year; and Blues Vision: African American Writing from Minnesota. She also collaborated on writing and publishing Josie R. Johnson’s memoir, Hope in the Struggle.

Shannon Gibney is a writer, educator, activist, and the author of See No Color (Carolrhoda Lab, 2015), and Dream Country (Dutton, 2018) young adult novels that won Minnesota Book Awards in 2016 and 2019. Gibney is faculty in English at Minneapolis College, where she teaches writing. A Bush Artist and McKnight Writing Fellow, her new novel, Botched, explores themes of transracial adoption through speculative memoir (Dutton, 2023).

Ricardo Levins Morales is a Puerto Rican artist and organizer based in Minneapolis. He uses his art as a form of political medicine to support individual and collective healing from the injuries and ongoing reality of oppression.

Mona Susan Power is an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux nation, and the author of four books of fiction: The Grass Dancer (winner of a PEN/Hemingway award), Roofwalker, Sacred Wilderness, and the forthcoming novel, A Council of Dolls.  Her fellowships include a James Michener Fellowship, Radcliffe Bunting Institute Fellowship, Princeton Hodder Fellowship, USA Artists Fellowship, McKnight Fellowship, and Native Arts and Cultures Fellowship. She lives in Saint Paul, MN, where she’s currently at work on a new novel titled, The Year of Fury.

신 선 영 Sun Yung Shin (she/they) is a Korean-born writer and is author of four books of poems: The Wet Hex (forthcoming in June 2022); Unbearable Splendor (Minnesota Book Award winner); Rough, and Savage; and Skirt Full of Black (Asian American Literary Award). They are the editor of three prose anthologies: What We Hunger For: Refugee & Immigrant Stories about Food & Family; A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota; (co-editor of) Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption. And they are also the author of two illustrated books for children: Cooper’s Lesson (bilingual Korean/English) and the (co-author of) forthcoming Where We Come From co-written by Diane Wilson, Shannon Gibney, and John Coy and illustrated by Dion MBD. They are a 2022 MacDowell Fellow. Please find their author self sunyungshin.com. @sunyungshin on FB, IG, and Twitter.