Singer Amikaeyla has spent her career sharing musical healing with people facing challenges around the world. Out of her own deep experiences with music as a force for healing, her work is fueled by a belief in its magic powers. So what has this last year during a pandemic, when her work was altered and sometimes unrecognizable, been like? What has kept her optimism and personal healing going? What lessons she learned over many years have come to the fore this year? Join us as we talk together about the practices, perspectives and power that have supported us each in this most unprecedented time.

Amikaeyla Gaston is a force for change. She creates environments that support people in exploring themselves and uses creativity and strategic questioning to support people in addressing their fears, developing a place where everyone has an equal voice. She has led corporations, universities, government, and nonprofit organizations through cultural competency & racial equity training. She has done extensive work in the health arena for over the past 20 years and travels the world extensively as a cultural arts ambassador for the State Department bringing together artists and healers of all forms and from all specialties to promote healing and wellness through the arts & activism. Her programming and work with refugees and at-risk children, youth, and families has been utilized and implemented by the Department of Health & Human Services, The American Psychological Association, and the US Consulate General’s Cultural Affairs office, taking her around the world to Israel, Beirut, Amman, Damascus, Palestine, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Nigeria & Sierra Leone just to name a few.

Throughout the world, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Intersex people continue to experience oppression, including physical attack, psychological torture and rejection by family, friends and communities. In his travels as a journalist, Robin Hammond began to meet people whose very identities are still illegal in their own countries. He set out to interview and photograph them, telling their stories through beautiful images and quotes, in their own words. His project became a passion, and part of his work as a social activist. Personal stories of losses associated with lack of acceptance and understanding change hearts and minds. Robin will share what he has learned and the work he is doing to change the global landscape for LGBTQI people.

The winner of numerous awards including a World Press Photo prize, the RF Kennedy Journalism Award, the W.Eugene Smith Award for Humanistic Photography, and four Amnesty International awards for Human Rights journalism, Robin Hammond has dedicated his career to documenting human rights and development issues around the world through long term photographic projects. His latest work on homophobia and trans-phobia, Where Love Is Illegal, has become a popular social media campaign that shares stories of discrimination and supports advocacy groups in Africa.

Robin is the founder of Witness Change, a non-profit organization dedicated to advancing human rights through highly visual story telling.

The war between so-called pro-choice and pro-life forces in America seem divided beyond repair. But where does that leave women who have made the often painful and important decision to have an abortion? As Kassi Underwood says, they are left with a choice between regret and relief, with few opportunities to talk about the experience and feel supported in their personal struggles. Kassi knows from personal experience that needing to hide all the sometimes complex feelings left after an abortion has a greater chance of fracturing women than the abortion itself. For even necessary losses are still losses, deserving our ear and calling for our attention. With great humor and fierce honesty, Kassi Underwood takes us along on her own search for answers and, in the process, helps us to think more deeply about this important subject.

Kassi Underwood’s work has been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic online, The Rumpus, and Refinery29. She holds an MFA in literary nonfiction from Columbia University, where she taught on the faculty of the Undergraduate Writing Program. In 2012, she won Exhale's Pro-Voice Storyteller Award in recognition of her personal essays on abortion; in 2013, she traveled across the United States, sharing her journey after abortion in an effort to bring peace to the abortion war. Described by audiences as “part-storyteller, part-public speaker, and part performance artist,” Kassi gives talks on the spirituality of abortion, addiction recovery, personal transformation, and social justice nationwide. She has addressed Christian churches and liberal arts colleges, shared a stage with standup comedians Amy Schumer and Sarah Silverman, and appeared as a guest on MSNBC and HuffPost Live. She lives with her husband in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she is a student at Harvard Divinity School and cohost of the podcast, Spiritually Blonde.

Across the great divide in America, city dwellers and the nation's farmers often fail to understand each other. Marie Mutsuki Mockett set out to close the gap, going back to the place in Nebraska where her family owns a farm and listening with her whole heart to the many of the men and women who raise the food that keeps all of us alive; midwest rural America. She travelled to seven states to participate with them in harvest. In the process, her ideas, assumptions and beliefs were challenged, leaving an indelible mark on her heart and mind. When we are able to truly listen to each other, how does it affect our view of the world? Does it lead to greater understanding and tolerance? How can we be true to ourselves while truly respecting the other person? Marie comes back from the heartland with some answers and many questions, inviting us to share with her a profound lesson in acceptance. Launching as we are all facing the effects of COVID-19, the book is timely in that it also takes a look at front line workers who help keep our food supply open.

Marie Motsuki Mockett is a novelist and memoirist. Born and raised in California to a Japanese mother and American father, she graduated from Columbia University. Her memoir, Where the Dead Pause and the Japanese Say Goodbye, explores how the Japanese cope with grief and tragedy. Her essay, Letter from a Japanese Crematorium, was anthologized in Norton’s Best Creative Nonfiction. Her first novel, Picking Bones from Ash, was was a finalist for the Paterson Prize. She’s written for many publications including The New York Times and has been a guest on The World, Talk of the Nation and All Things Considered. Her new book, “American Harvest,” is set in seven agricultural and heartland states and was a finalist for the Lukas Prize for Nonfiction. Marie received her MFA from the Bennington Writers Seminars and teaches fiction and nonfiction at the Rainier Writing Workshop, in Tacoma, Washington is a Visiting Writer in the MFA program at Saint Mary’s College.

Susan Hayden experienced three sudden losses that shaped her life; her childhood best friend, her father and her husband. How did she shape these losses into the creative voice she crafted over a lifetime? How did they change her? Going forward from loss, what do we take with us and what do we leave behind? Her first published memoir, Now You Are a Missing Person, makes poetry of loss, showing us how to integrate our love into a new creation.

Susan Hayden is a poet, playwright, novelist, and essayist. Her plays have been performed live on KPFK’s Pacifica Performance Showcase and produced at the Met Theatre, Padua Playwrights, The Lost Studio and elsewhere. Her poems and stories have been published in numerous anthologies, including Beat Not Beat from Moon Tide Press, The Black Body from Seven Stories Press, and bestselling Los Angeles In the 1970s/Weird Scenes Inside the Goldmine from Rare Bird Books. She was a Finalist in the Inaugural Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award with Penguin Press for her unpublished novel, Cat Stevens Saved My Life. Hayden is the creator and producer of Library Girl, a monthly words and music series now in its 14th year at Ruskin Group Theatre. In 2015, she was presented with the Artist in the Community/Bruria Finkel Award from the Santa Monica Arts Foundation for her significant contributions to the energetic discourse within Santa Monica’s arts community. You can find her at susanhayden.com.

Abbe Greenberg and Maggie Sarachek have literally written the book on supporting yourself through anxiety and panic attacks. And of course, they tried it ALL to deal with their own anxiety, because experience is the best teacher! Join us to talk about how they each experienced anxiety, what they did to address it, and what it is like to support others through the same struggle. So much is lost as a result of anxiety; our freedoms, our sense of well-being, relationships and time! But confronting anxiety is possible and, through the process, we can develop a kinder attitude towards all our struggles.

What leads us to explore our relationship to death? For Angela Fama, it began when a terrible accident caused her to consider her own death. But she noticed that when she tried to talk about death, she met discomfort and resistance. Instead of dropping the conversation, she searched for ways to enter into it; to make others more comfortable with the subject. Out of this need of hers, the Death Conversation Game was born!

Angela Fama (she/they) is the creator of Death Conversation Game and facilitator of Let’s Talk About Death. They are also an interdisciplinary artist, photographer, musician, and aspiring death doula. In their praxis, Fama focuses on the inner and outer connections that can be made pushing at the edges of the barriers surrounding ‘sticky’ subjects (such as trauma, identity, love, and death). Born on The Farm in Tennessee, they were raised in Ontario and Zimbabwe, and currently reside on the unceded traditional territories of the Coast Salish xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and Sel̓íl̓witulh Nations (Vancouver, Canada). They work from an intersectional feminist perspective valuing equity, inclusive of all genders, sexual orientations, abilities, races, religions, and classes.

Some believe that dying people increasingly speak nonsense, losing their grip on reality. But Lisa Smartt, a linguist trained to pay deep attention to words, realized as her father was dying that what he was saying was coherent and deeply moving, pointing to a world which she little understood and inviting an exploration of what he might be talking about. After his death, she hurtled headlong into a mission; collecting final words, convinced they had something profound to offer those of us who are not dying. The Final Words Project and her book, Words at the Threshhold: What We Say as We're Nearing Death, are the beautiful result. I was honored to be quoted in this beautiful book!

Lisa Smartt, MA, is the author of Words at the Threshold. A linguist, educator, and poet, she founded the Final Words Project, an ongoing study devoted to collecting and interpreting the mysterious language at the end of lives. She co-facilitates workshops about language and consciousness with Raymond Moody at universities, hospices, and conferences and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Visit her online at http://www.finalwordsproject.org.