In Celebration of Creation: Congratulating A-lan on her First Literary Publication
Feb 26 2016
By Mia Ritter-Whittle
At IDA we are blessed to be consistently surrounded by creative minds, bodies, and spirits, putting in work to uplift our communities and the generations that follow them. It is truly an honor to be taught by people who know how to help us actively love and be with, ourselves. Today we'd like to uplift one of our own, A-lan Holt, who will be releasing her very first literary publication, Moonwork, in June.
This is how A-lan explains her job in her own words:
"I am a Playwright. I write for theater and film. I often express myself through poetry. These days, I also hold the title of Associate Director at the Institute for Diversity in the Arts (IDA) at Stanford University. My work explores the relationship between art practice, spiritual practice and social justice."
In my own personal experience, A-lan functions as guidance.
"I am inspired by it all- artisthood and motherhood and womanhood and blackness-they are all parts of the same thing. If one is living, the others are living too. The strategy here is to create more living things within myself and my communities."
A-lan will be releasing two projects this year, one, a film she wrote and directed called Inamorata, and the other, which we're highlighting today, is a collection of poetry published by Candor Arts called Moonwork. These are nu poems written mostly in New York and Los Angeles— they are all about love.
Here is A-lan on Moonwork:
"In 2011, I received a prompt: 'Invest a narrative in someone you do not know.' A few days later I met someone. That morning (like a good poet) I began to write him poems. Wild how creativity conspires, ‘cause our relationship would break. open. my. world… and I would write it all down. The poems are vestiges of the most intimate moments we spent together; bodies attempting to make the moon work in our favor..."
We want to thank A-lan for continuing to write and inspiring us to write. Inspiring us to breathe, feel, create.
In celebration of creation, we thank you, A-lan, for all that you are to us and the world around you.
