"From the Clemente Classroom: 100-Word Stories on Stitching Time: The Social Justice Collaboration Quilts Project" Reading

Friday, December 9, 6-7:30pm | Free in gallery & Livestreamed

Students from the Bard College Clemente Course for the Humanities read from their class publication "From the Clemente Classroom: 100-Word Stories on Stitching Time: The Social Justice Collaboration Quilts Project".

This manuscript marks the second time my students in the Clemente Course in the Humanities have shared their work from my Critical Thinking and Writing Class with the world, both in this published form and at a live reading hosted by the Augusta Savage Gallery at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. This year, we visited the Gallery to see the nationally-touring exhibit Stitching Time: The Social Justice Collaboration Quilts Project, a collective art project across prisons in the U.S. to raise money for inmates in hospice care. Artists include co-founders Kenya Baleech Alkebu and Maureen Kelleher, as well as Leonard Peltier and Ramsey Orta. 

Clemente students wrote poetry and prose  in response to these stunning quilts using the 100 Word Story prompt and process, which requires quick, emotionally-responsive drafting, revising, and editing. My students’ work here reflects a writing process that took place over six weeks, but it also reflects much more than their hard work and commitment to revision and editing. It also reflects their strong connection to the works in the exhibit, the ideas and imagery, and the special experience of witnessing the art of people locked inside and otherwise generally cut off from the public. The work collected here was shared with the artists, with the help of Maureen Kelleher, and we were likewise able to hear back from the artists and their impressions of our work. This kind of exchange, mediated through different modes of art-making, invigorated our sense of what it means to communicate, and how art can connect and commune. 

I am in awe of my Clemente students’ work herein, and I hope you will see in this collection that to write, to make art, to embrace connection and to desire mutual liberation are critical to the making of a better world. 

Anna-Claire Simpson
Instructor, Clemente Course in the Humanities, Springfield MA
PhD Candidate, UMass Amherst 

Click here to learn more about and watch students from last year's Bard College Clemente Course for the Humanities read from their class publication "From the Clemente Classroom: 100-Word Stories on Breathing While Black".