Art House Seeks Submissions For Collaborative Jersey City Community Poem Project

Art House Productions is accepting submissions for the Jersey City Community Poem Project. To celebrate National Poetry Month, Art House will create an original, digital community poem with the theme "Life in the Pandemic and Beyond: Quarantine, Devastation, and Hope for the Future." Jersey City's Poet Laureate, Rashad Wright will curate the poem. This project is sponsored by the City of Jersey City and Office of Cultural Affairs.

Rashad will take lines and excerpts from submissions and create a crowdsourced, community poem. Once the poem is created, Art House will publish it online, where contributors will be credited, and seek video submissions of community members performing the original work to be compiled in a video presentation. This unique time is worth preserving so that we can help future generations understand the experience of being quarantined in 2020.

"Art House is excited to partner with Jersey City Cultural Affairs and actively engage the arts community around a collaborative work of art. My hope is that the poem and subsequent video project created will be a kind of artistic time capsule for what we are all currently experiencing around COVID-19. The act of creation will be healing to the many artists who will participate and the work of art itself will be cathartic to all those that will experience it," says Meredith Burns, Executive Director of Art House.

Submissions can be a haiku, free verse or a rhyming poem, whatever your creative energy tells you, but submit no more than 10 lines. Writers must be currently based in New Jersey. In order to participate, please fill out the submission form before Saturday, May 9 at 5:00pm EST. Please click here to submit: https://forms.gle/UyRbNw1RLVjqFV316.

This is a community-based and community-centered project and we hope the final poem will be inclusive and accessible to all ages. Please be considerate of this as you craft your submission.

"We want to give New Jersey residents the opportunity to be creative and introspective with their submissions. Once the poem is complete, we hope it will bring artists and audiences in our community together," says Producing Director Courtney Little.

For more information, please visit www.arthouseproductions.org/pages/jc-community-poem or email info@arthouseproductions.org.

To post a comment, you must register and login.