Orange County NC Website
DocuSign Envelope ID: CF1E5821-41D3-41 CA-BE86-7063BD8D1470 <br /> that will be used are: "Asians from the South"by G Yamazawa;"Afro Latina"by Elizabeth Acevedo; <br /> "On Being a Black Girl(for those of you who aren't)"by Patricia Smith; "10 Things You Should Know <br /> About the Boy I Never Was"by Hunter Gantz;"Who Said it Was Simple"by Audre Lorde; "Coca Cola <br /> and Coco Frio"by Martin Espada; "A Letter to Chris Brown"by Rudy Francisco; "A Letter to the <br /> Schoolyard Bully"by Andrea Gibson; and"Enter the Dragon"by John Murillo. <br /> 100%of the$2000 total project cost will be used to pay Kane Smego. <br /> Michael Irwin and Kane Smego have been collaborating on artistic youth empowerment and literacy <br /> projects for over a decade. Once upon a time,Kane Smego was a student in Michael Irwin's English <br /> class,where he was an active participant in Irwin's extracurricular youth arts program Scene&Heard,a <br /> collective that performed poetry and puppetry social justice themed shows,whose core student members <br /> eventually helped to birth the successful non-profit Sacrificial Poets. Upon Kane's graduation from <br /> UNC,he served as the Co-founder and Artistic Director of Sacrificial Poets,performing and teaching in <br /> countless schools locally and across North Carolina. During this time,Michael Irwin served on the <br /> Board of Directors for Sacrificial Poets and made it a primary goal to get Kane Smego into Chapel Hill <br /> Schools as often as possible. In 2013,we received an Orange County Arts Commission Education <br /> Coalition grant in order to bring Kane and other Sacrificial Poet educators into Chapel Hill High School, <br /> Carrboro High School,and Phoenix Academy for multiple weeks of creative instruction. Since that <br /> time,Kane has been a fixture of the Arts Academy program,teaching poetry performance in many <br /> different subject areas. Needless to say,Kane has quite a following in our school district. Teachers in <br /> the Arts Academy get very excited and passionate about having Kane teach in their classes, and <br /> "optional assemblies"in our auditorium are heavily attended by hundreds of students and teachers when <br /> he performs. Tell Your Story is a long overdue Arts Residency program that will bring out the best in <br /> Kane's teaching, as he will dive deep into 5 consecutive days with 5 different classes. Kane is also <br /> eager to collect student work throughout the week in order to give the critical feedback that students <br /> crave in order to polish their best performance poems. <br /> Tell Your Story fits perfectly into the tenth grade World Literature English curriculum. In the Chapel <br /> Hill Carrboro City Schools,one of our cornerstone tasks is to explore the power of narrative in World <br /> Literature and to connect it to our own lives in a contemporary context. Students in Michael Irwin's <br /> English classes will already have read and discussed the power of narrative through the magical realism <br /> short stories of Isabel Allende, Chinua Achebe's African novel Things Fall Apart,and Kamala <br /> Markandaya's Indian novel Nectar in a Sieve. Students will already have a deep understanding of social <br /> oppression theory and how our stories are deeply influenced by our identity development. Additionally, <br /> in the weeks following Tell Your Story, students will take excerpts from their work to produce a visual <br /> art installation in the lobby of Chapel Hill High School. <br /> Thank you kindly for your consideration-we are very excited about this project, and we welcome <br /> anyone from the Orange County Arts Commission to join us for one of our project teaching days! <br />