FREE
Free Write with Gail Newman
Poetry and the Power of Memory
What memories do we carry with us? What comes from our culture, our families, our past?
We will use poetic devices including anaphora, image, and form to inspire writing that explores these questions. We will look at poetry and prose and consider the voice of the narrator, encompassing both personal and collective memory. We will write together, listen, share, discuss and discover. During hard times, poetry that looks at the past can offer resilience, courage, and hope for the future.
Gail Newman was born after WW II in a displaced person’s camp in Lansberg, Germany. The daughter of Polish Holocaust survivors, she was raised in a community of Jewish immigrants in Los Angeles.
Gail worked as an educator at the San Francisco Contemporary Jewish Museum, where she integrated poetry workshops with gallery tours and art projects for students, seniors and Alzheimer visitors. Co-founder and editor of Room, a Women's Literary Journal, she alsoedited Inside Out, a book of poetry lessons for teachers. She is a poet-teacher and former San Francisco coordinator for CalPoets. Most recently she conducted a poetry workshops based on survivor testimony for the Johannesburg Holocaust and Genocide Center in South Africa.
Gail’s poems have appeared in journals and anthologies including Prairie Schooner, Calyx, Lilith, Nimrod International Journal, Ghosts of the Holocaust, and Prism (An Interdisciplinary Journal for Holocaust Educators).
A new collection of poems about her family, BLOOD MEMORY, chosen by Marge Piercy for the Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize, was published in 2020.
