Mother Voices: Toshi Reagon, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and Rachel Harding in Conversation

Please join Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Rachel Elizabeth Harding, and Toshi Reagon for “Mother Voices: Transformative Intergenerational Journey, A Conversation.” These three groundbreaking creatives will fuse their wisdom, spirit, and minds as they discuss the beauty and power of intergenerational learning and teaching.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs is an award-winning poet/author who is cherished by a wide range of communities as an oracle and a vessel of love. One of the great joys of Alexis’s life is collaborating on Long Water Song with Toshi Reagon, a series of healing transformative marine mammal meditations.

Rachel Elizabeth Harding is a poet, historian, and scholar of religions of the Afro-Atlantic diaspora and Chair of the Ethnic Studies Department at the University of Colorado Denver. She writes about religion, creativity, and social justice in the experience of communities of African descent in the US and Brazil. Dr. Harding is an ebômi (ritual elder) in the Terreiro do Cobre Candomblé community in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil.

Toshi Reagon is the 2022-2023 Joseph McKeen Visiting Fellow at Bowdoin College, where she brings her Parable Path work to Brunswick and the wider Maine community. She has been named Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Creative Futures Artist-in-Residence with the Carolina Performing Arts organization. Other recent projects include her involvement in the Met Civic Practice Partnership, and Parable Path artist residencies.

This event is a part of Parable Path Maine, a framework Toshi Reagan is bringing to Bowdoin during the course of her fellowship that is based on Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower. Through a decades-long career, and most recently through national and international Parable Path collaborations, Reagon has brought people together to name precarities, expand networks, and craft solutions to create a framework for community organizing through artistic engagement.

For the Parable Path Maine initiative, the McKeen Center for the Common Good at Bowdoin College is working alongside Portland-based Indigo Arts Alliance, which supports Maine-based Black and brown artists and activists, and the Maine Humanities Council, whose focus on Afrofuturism for the next two years brings the work of Butler to libraries, correctional facilities, and community organizations across the state. The fellowship culminates with a performance of Toshi and Bernice Reagon’s congregational opera adaptation of Parable of the Sower. This one-night-only event will be presented by Indigo Arts Alliance and Portland Ovations in association with the College, and will be performed at Merrill Auditorium in Portland, Maine, on April 14, 2023.