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Three
Women to Discuss Career Paths Less Traveled
There’s
no question that three panelists—two
Smith alumnae—who will visit Smith
on Thursday, Nov. 4, have led unconventional lives. They have built successful
careers as a freelance writer, a poet/playwright/composer and a singer-songwriter.
As part of the Women’s Narratives Project, writer Carolina A. Miranda ’93, Northampton
Poet Laureate Lenelle Moïse MFA’04 and singer/songwriter Dar Williams will speak
on a panel, “Resisting Convention: Narratives of Passion and Purpose” at 4:15
p.m. in the Campus Center Carroll Room. A reception will follow at 5:30 p.m.
at which CDs and other merchandise will be available for sale.
Anyone with a
desire to pursue her passion as a career will have interest
in the panel. The three women will discuss their paths, how
they managed to maintain the necessary drive and ambition
to pursue what they love despite many challenges, and the
courage to remain resilient through failure.
Sponsored by
the Center for Work and Life and Women's Narratives Project,
the panel will be moderated by Jennifer Walters, dean of
religious life.
 Carolina Miranda is a freelance
writer based in New York City, where she covers travel, culture
and entertainment for a variety of national and regional
publications, including O: The Oprah
Magazine, Travel + Leisure and Florida
Travel + Life. She has also worked as a reporter
for Time magazine, where she reported on education, the arts
and social issues, in addition to many other subjects. During
her time there, she interviewed Al Gore about his global
warming documentary, An Inconvenient
Truth, reported on the
burgeoning industry of skate park design and was part of
the team that broke the news of irregularities in FEMA director
Michael Brown’s resume in the wake of Hurricane
Katrina. She has appeared as a commentator in a variety of television broadcasts,
including Today, Good Morning America and Charlie
Rose. She is also the author
of the art blog C-Monster.net.
At Smith, Miranda majored in
Latin American Studies. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband,
Ed Tahaney.
 Haitian-American
powerhouse Lenelle Moïse is an award-winning poet, playwright, essayist, composer
and nationally touring performance artist. She creates intimate, fiery, politicized,
texts about the intersection of race, class, gender, sexuality, spirituality,
culture and resistance. Fueled by the motto “words rouse worlds,” she regularly
presents interactive performances and workshops that empower diverse groups of
people to creatively speak up and act for social change. Moïse has been a guest
artist at the United Nations, the Culture Project, the Louisiana Superdome, the
Omega Institute and dozens of theatres, colleges and conferences across the United
States and Canada. Curve Magazine calls her poetry "piercing, covering territory
both intimate and political...vivid and powerful." Moïse recently performed her
critically acclaimed Off-Broadway play Expatriate at Smith as part of Otelia
Cromwell Day. The play, inspired her second CD The
Expatriate Amplification Project,
is an all-vocal, poly-rhythmic, urban fusion of jazz, funk and soul. Moïse's
writing is published in a number of anthologies, including Word
Warriors: 35 Women Leaders in the Spoken Word Revolution, We
Don't Need Another Wave: Dispatches from the Next Generation
of Feminists, and Brassage: An
Anthology of Poems by Haitian Women. She is the 2010 recipient of the Astraea Lesbian Writers Fund
Award in Poetry and is the 2010-2012 Poet Laureate of Northampton, Mass.
 Raised in Chappaqua, N.Y., and
educated at Wesleyan University, Dar Williams began making
the rounds on the coffeehouse circuit while living in Northampton.
Joan Baez, an early fan of her music, took Williams out on
the road and recorded several of her songs. In 1995, two
years after self-releasing her first CD, The
Honesty Room,
Williams signed with Razor & Tie Entertainment.
Williams’ songs
are a continuing narrative of her life, but also employ a
reporter’s keen eye
and a fiction writer’s feel for nuance in describing what
she has called “the
big picture of how people approach life."
Along with her six studio albums — also including The
Green World (2000) and
The Beauty of the Rain (2003)— she’s also released the onstage document Out
There Live (2001) and the DVD Live
at Bearsville Theater (2007). |
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