Transformative Language Arts in Action

Transformative Language Arts, an emerging field and profession, calls on us to use writing, storytelling, theater, music, expressive and other arts for social change, personal growth, and culture shift. In this landmark anthology, Transformative Language Artists share their stories, scholarship and practices for a more just and peaceful world, from a Hmong storyteller and spoken word artist weaving traditions with contemporary immigrant challenges in Philadelphia, to a playwright raising awareness of AIDS/HIV prevention.

Read the stories, consider the questions raised, and find inspiration and tools in using words as a vehicle for transformation through essays on the challenge of dominant stories, public housing women writing for their lives, histories and communities at the margins, singing as political action, the convergence of theology and poetics, women's self-leadership, embodied writing, and healing the self, others, and nature through TLA.

The anthology also includes “snapshots,” short features on transformative language artists who make their livings and lives working with people of all ages and backgrounds to speak their truths, and change their communities.

Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg is the 2009-13 Kansas Poet Laureate, founder of Transformative Language Arts at Goddard College, where she teaches, and author of five collections of poetry; the novel, The Divorce Girl; an award-winning book on the Holocaust, Needle in the Bone; and several memoirs. She leads community writing workshops widely for many populations. www.CarynMirriamGoldberg.com

Ruth Farmer is an essayist, poet, fiction writer, and educator. She directs the Goddard Graduate Institute and teaches at the Community College of Vermont. Writing and learning have always been essential in her life, personally and professionally. In recent years, she has embraced dance and yoga as expressive languages that go where words cannot go.