Songlines, Scripps College’s unique performance series of eclectic poetry and music by Southern California artists, will host an evening with Los Angeles poet Karen Holden and musician Cory Wright on Wednesday, March 26, at 7:30 p.m. in the Hampton Room of the Malott Commons. The performance, “This Music,” and reception immediately following are free and open to the public. Songlines is sponsored through the Alexa Fullerton Hampton Speaker Series at Scripps College; for more information, please call the Malott Commons Office at (909) 607-8508.
Currently poet-in-residence at the Long Beach Museum of Art, Karen Holden’s professional titles include teacher, book artist and illustrator, painter, and poet, among others. She is the celebrated author of Book of Changes, a series of poems on each one of the I Ching‘s 64 hexagrams of divination and inspired by her ten-year dedicated study of the ancient Chinese text. Her current poetry manuscript, This Music, is written in response to jazz, classical, and alternative music and will serve as the basis for her performance at Scripps. According to critics: “Holden’s poetry is a gentle but indelible voice among us… uncompromised and unafraid.”
Throughout her 20-year career, Holden has taught courses and seminars in poetry and writing, and about the creative process at schools, museums, and social institutions throughout Southern California. She is the recipient of numerous awards, grants, and honors including four California Arts Council teaching grants and a National Endowment for the Arts artist-in-residence grant. Holden’s career in the visual arts includes numerous one-woman shows in galleries and museums across the nation, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art featured her artist-book, Behind My Own Disguise, in a recent exhibition.
Holden is a graduate of Scripps College and has completed doctoral work in psychology at the University of Illinois.
Jazz musician Cory Wright started playing the saxophone and clarinet over 20 years ago. His formal studies in jazz and classical music began at Oberlin College and culminated in a master’s degree at USC. Wright also studied saxophone and jazz performance with Donald Byrd, Nathan Davis, and Bob Sheppard; flute with Gary Woodward; and composition with Vince Mendoza. Currently, he can be heard around the Los Angeles jazz music scene performing with his quartet, Boxes of Water, as well as with Industrial Jazz Group, the New Standards, the Jazz Poets, and Adam Rudolph’s Go:Organic Orchestra.
Songlines is made possible through the Alexa Fullerton Hampton Speaker Series, a fund established by the generous bequest of Alexa Fullerton Hampton, Scripps College Class of 1942.