Hauppauge Public Library: NEA Big Read Long Island Kick Off

Press release from the Hauppauge Public Library:

October 6, 2021

Teatro Yerbabruja will kick off its 7-month NEA BIG READ LONG ISLAND Project on Monday October 11, starting at 1 PM, at its home in the historic Second Avenue Firehouse, 17 Second Avenue, in downtown Bay Shore.

The National Endowment for the Arts awarded a NEA BIG READ grant to Teatro Yerbabruja, one of 61such grants awarded nationally and the only one awarded for a Long Island project. The NEA BIGREAD grant supports a Long Island communities reading program that focuses on the book selectedfrom among the five offered by NEA. Teatro Yerbabruja’s NEA BIG READ LONG ISLAND will focuson An American Sunrise, a collection of poems by Joy Harjo, the current, and first, indigenous UnitedStates Poet Laureate. Ms. Harjo is a member of the Creek/Muscogee Nation, and will do a day-longresidency on April 8, 2022 as part of the program.

NEA BIG READ LONG ISLAND will include dozens of free events throughout Suffolk County, atpublic libraries, cultural and community organizations, including in Long Island’s Shinnecock andMontaukett Nations. Those events range from a reading and discussion of Ms. Harjo’s An AmericanSunrise to readings and discussions of her and other authors’ related works targeted at adult and youngeraudiences, as well as theme-related visual art exhibits and the various performing arts. Ms. Harjo will bethe keynote speaker at Bay Shore High School’s Ethnic Pen Conference on April 8 and will give apublic reading on the Shinnecock Reservation that evening.

“We are an organization that envisions its many visual and performing arts events as a means ofachieving constructive social and economic change in the heavily Latino-populated Long Islandcommunities that we generally serve, and it would have been easy simply to choose the offered book bya Latina author,” said Margarita Espada, Teatro Yerbabruja’s Founder and Executive-Artistic Director.“But it was clear that we had to accept the challenge of focusing on a different marginalized populationof color, so that interested Long Islanders could better explore the similarities and differences betweenand within those populations.”

The program on October 11 will include an art show focused on indigenous artists, poetry reading andconversations about decolonization and indigenous people in America and around the world.

This press release was produced by the Hauppauge Public Library. The views expressed here are the author’s own.