Friend Dwayne Parish is a magician with acronyms and specializes in a spoken word poetry that he calls hiphopnotherapy. When you hear it live, it does put you into a trance. Here is a piece he wrote for us as a gift last year and I am happy to have a place to share it. Thank you, Dwayne!

NEW VILLAGE PRESS

Near, if not nearest to the heart of humanity is our dear friend–New Village Press!
Earnestly infusing art into community-building & filling the needs of a world pleading to become
Whole. New Village Press is achieving this goal through the power of the printed picture and word. I’ve heard
Voices rise from the pages of their books. I urge you to look & it’s my wish to introduce you to works they publish.
I highly recommend, Beginner’s Guide to Community-Based Arts. Mat Schwarzman & Keith Knight cut right to the heart of the matter with
Laughter directed at correcting what’s sadder in society & then, the unfurling of Sandra Leibowitz Earley’s Ecological Design and Building Schools
Lends the coolest tools and guides to find “green” design education. Please, for the sake of the Earth, embrace the value of this work.
Also, you’ll want to know about Performing Communities & its unity at the grassroots level, crossing genres & the country & oh, how so
Good it is to know that creators of theaters, performers, directors & more are first humanitarians. Robert H. Leonard & Ann Kilkelly,
Excellent work! I tell thee. Works of Heart with “art” in its title and living color on each page, profiles citizen artists revitalizing communities with creative
Projects & collects to share even more resources in its country-wide guide. My eyes widened & watered, & I beg your pardon but after you’ve
Read, Doing Time in the Garden you’ll understand flower-power & the man, James Jiler, whose horticultural training for the incarcerated.
Exemplifies why nature heals humanity. New Creative Community by Arlene Goldbard is hard to put down. It’s a field-defining treatise of the
State of the “arts of the people”. And wait ’til you get your hands & eyes & nose on the opus color tome of the late Karl Linn. In Building Commons and Community, this humble
Saint of neighborhood place-making offers know-how for growing shared gardens and parks and shows everyone what they had (all along) in their hearts.

Now if you don’t get all I’ve said up above, just know New Village Press is expressions of Love.

ADorsement © dwayne o. parish