According to TED.com: “With words like shards of glass, Chinaka Hodge cuts open 2016 and lets 12 months of violence, grief, fear, shame, courage and hope spill out in this original poem about a year none of us will soon forget.”
“Chinaka Hodge is a writer and educator from Oakland. She received her BA from NYU’s Gallatin School and studied Writing for Film and Television at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts MFA program. Her work has been featured in Believer Magazine, Teen People Magazine, Newsweek, San Francisco Magazine, on PBS and NPR, and in two seasons of HBO’s Def Poetry. She was an Associate Producer on Simmons Lathan presents Brave New Voices for HBO.”
“She is a Cave Canem Graduate Fellow, was a playwright-in-residence at SF Playwrights Foundation and serves as a Visiting Editor at The California Sunday Magazine. She is an inaugural Senior Fellow at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.”
Chinaka Hodge: What will you tell your daughters about 2016?
For those of you not familiar with TED Talks here is a brief summery from www.ted.com: “TED is a small nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. Since then its scope has become ever broader. Along with two annual conferences — the TED Conference in Long Beach and Palm Springs each spring, and the TEDGlobal conference in Oxford UK each summer — TED includes the award-winning TEDTalks video site, the Open Translation Project and Open TV Project, the inspiring TED Fellows and TEDx programs, and the annual TED Prize”
According to TED.com: “Our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories. Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice — and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding.”
“Inspired by Nigerian history and tragedies all but forgotten by recent generations of westerners, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novels and stories are jewels in the crown of diasporan literature.”
“In Nigeria, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel Half of a Yellow Sun has helped inspire new, cross-generational communication about the Biafran war. In this and in her other works, she seeks to instill dignity into the finest details of each character, whether poor, middle class or rich, exposing along the way the deep scars of colonialism in the African landscape.”
“Adichie’s newest book, The Thing Around Your Neck, is a brilliant collection of stories about Nigerians struggling to cope with a corrupted context in their home country, and about the Nigerian immigrant experience.”
Enjoy.
For those of you not familiar with TED Talks here is a brief summery from www.ted.com: “TED is a small nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. Since then its scope has become ever broader. Along with two annual conferences — the TED Conference in Long Beach and Palm Springs each spring, and the TEDGlobal conference in Oxford UK each summer — TED includes the award-winning TEDTalks video site, the Open Translation Project and Open TV Project, the inspiring TED Fellows and TEDx programs, and the annual TED Prize”
The DNA Journey by momon.d0 and posted on Youtube by LetsOpenOurWorld is the offering for today. I usually do TED Talks on Thursday, but thought this video was so powerful that you might enjoy seeing it.
Here is what LetsOpenOurWorld has to say about this video: “It’s easy to think there are more things dividing us than uniting us. But we actually have much more in common with other nationalities than you’d think. We asked 67 people from all over the world to take a DNA test, and it turns out they have much more in common with other nationalities than they would ever have thought.”
“Let’s Open Our World is an invitation to travel across boundaries, embrace our differences and open our world. At momondo we believe that everybody should be able to travel the world, to meet other people, and experience other cultures and religions. Travel opens our minds: when we experience something different, we begin to see things differently. Share this video, and help us spread the word – and open our world.”
Enjoy.
momondo – The DNA Journey
To see more personal stories from Jay, Aurelie, Carlos, Yanina, Karen and Ellaha go here: http://momon.do/DNA.Playlist
According to TED.com: “With words like shards of glass, Chinaka Hodge cuts open 2016 and lets 12 months of violence, grief, fear, shame, courage and hope spill out in this original poem about a year none of us will soon forget.”
For more about monondo see: