Opening Keynote: Philip Metres (John Carroll University) (Facilitated by Michelle Collins-Sibley)
“Shrapnel Maps: Stories Seeking Peace & Justice in Israel-Palestine”
For nearly twenty years, Philip Metres has been actively engaged in the quest for a just peace for Palestinians and Israelis–as an activist, peacemaker, scholar, teacher, and writer. His fourth book of poems, Shrapnel Maps, writes into the wounds of the Israel-Palestine conflict, raising the voices of Palestinians and Israelis as they confront the predicament of injustice and violence, of empire and resistance. Metres will read from the work and reflect on how storytelling and poetry can offer other ways of engaging in seeking justice and peace, through the transformational work of the moral imagination.
Dr. Philip Metres is the author of ten books, including Shrapnel Maps (Copper Canyon 2020). His other works include The Sound of Listening (essays), Pictures at an Exhibition (poems), the translation I Burned at the Feast: Selected Poems of Arseny Tarkovsky, and Sand Opera. His work has garnered fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as six Ohio Arts Council grants, the Hunt Prize, the Adrienne Rich Award, two Arab American Book Awards, the Watson Fellowship, the Lyric Poetry Award, the Alice James Award, the Creative Workforce Fellowship, and the Cleveland Arts Prize. He is professor of English and director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights program at John Carroll University.
