Members of the Case Western Reserve University community are invited to join Kelvin Smith Library, the Flora Stone Mather Center for Women and Arianna Papai, a painting student at the Cleveland Institute of Art, for a blackout poetry crafting event Friday, April 26, from 12:45 to 2 p.m. on the library’s first floor.
April is National Poetry Month, and this event invites community members to tell their story (any story) by creating their own blackout poetry. Additional craft supplies—such as markers, colored pencils, collage and button-making—also will be available.
Blackout poetry is a unique style of poetry in which the poet takes an already written material, like a book page, and blacks out everything except for select words. The remaining words on the page create a poem or story, sometimes with an entirely different meaning.
Papai is a Cleveland Institute of Art student majoring in painting and participating in the Creativity Works Program, funded by the Fenn Educational Fund and G.R. Lincoln Family Foundation. She will facilitate the event and create custom giveaways for a raffle, which participants can enter during the event. Papai will exhibit a collection of paintings titled “Laced with Love,” which focuses on the experiences of being a femme-presenting person, in the Kelvin Smith Library Art Gallery on May 9.