Tag: Leah Klass

Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic and Printed Matter Vancouver Present A Book Launch Event for Reach Out, Reach In by Leah Klass

April 17, 2022

Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic

Featuring Printed Matter Vancouver Author Leah Klass

Hosted by Christopher Luna and Morgan Paige

LGBTQ+ FRIENDLY, PRO-SCIENCE, ANTI-FASCIST,  

ALL AGES, AND UNCENSORED SINCE 2004

7 pm

Thursday, May 12

Art at the Cave

108 E Evergreen Blvd

Vancouver, WA 98660

https://artatthecave.com

$5 Suggested donation

Donations can be made in person or through Christopher Luna’s PayPal account (christopherjluna@gmail.com). Include a memo stating that the money is for Ghost Town Poetry. The suggested donation is five dollars.

The Ghost Town Poetry community respectfully encourages you to support Niche Wine Bar, whose owner, Leah Jackson, provided a home for the reading series from 2015-2020: https://nichewinebar.com.

UPDATED Statement on Healthy Spaces from Art at the Cave: We want to provide a healthy space to enjoy art. We have been practicing safety precautions such as regular cleaning, social distancing and mask wearing.

As a result of the removal of the mask mandate effective March 12, 2022, we will no longer require the wearing of masks. We encourage you to continue to wear a mask if it makes you feel more comfortable, and we will supply masks and hand sanitizer at the door. As social distancing has become a norm, please be mindful some will still need a bit of personal space while inside the gallery.

Art At The CAVE was established in 2017. Located at 108 E. Evergreen in downtown Vancouver, the CAVE is free and open to the public Tues-Sat, 10am-4pm, and on First Fridays when it remains open until 8:00pm. The gallery is also available to host events. Visit the website at artatthecave.com or contact gallery@artatthecave.com for more information

ABOUT LEAH KLASS

Born in Washington, D.C., Leah’s education has included attending diverse public schools and studying abroad. She learned Spanish in the homes of her friends in Falls Church, Virginia. In high school she turned 16 on a secular kibbutz, where she worked on the assembly line in an olive factory and was chased by ostriches. She later waitressed and cleaned houses to help pay for her studies in Anthropology at the University of Virginia which included a year of study abroad in Brazil. She completed a master’s degree in International Peace and Conflict Resolution at the University of Queensland thanks to a Rotary Fellowship in Argentina and Australia.

She spent the first years of her career bringing businesses from different countries together and encouraging friendships between strangers. Market research and report writing were a ticket to long weekends in Chile and high speed taxi rides in Mexico. She has also helped get social services to migrant communities, taught students how to better network and facilitated group discussions for international business people.

Leah’s greatest pleasures are making connections and reaching out to build community. Speaking many languages allows her to communicate with more people. She speaks Spanish, Portuguese and some Hebrew and German. She is committed to valuing intergenerational relationships and amplifying kindness.

After becoming a mother, Leah experienced a great shift in her understanding of the world and felt an overwhelming desire to express her need to build community and to help others find and use their voices. In tandem, she joined a kind and passionate poetry community in Portland, Oregon. With the support of the group, poetry has become a way for her to tell stories and to activate others to go out and do something good.

Learn more at www.leahklass.com.

The debut collection of poetry by Leah Klass tells stories of discovering empathy through human connection. Her work is a rallying call to value our everyday interactions with other people. Reach Out, Reach In offers concrete ideas for transforming the world into a warmer, more welcoming place.

Reach Out, Reach In

By Leah Klass

Published by Printed Vancouver

October 25, 2021

Cover Art & Design by Mercer Hanau

Edited by Toni Lumbrazo Luna and Christopher Luna

ASIN: ‎ B09K1HRGF6

ISBN-13‏: ‎ 979-8985129106

Order now: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09K1HRGF6/

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR REACH OUT, REACH IN

How we are made is how we see, and from the rich mosaic of her background Leah Klass delivers kaleidoscopic poems that will persuade your vision to see this world made strange and precious. This book offers local beginnings, global consciousness, and the courage to use language for what it needs to do: sustain the sovereign self engaged in connecting the private life to the public world. Enter this book troubled, then emerge knowing “there is another way.” — Kim Stafford, author of Singer Come from Afar

I read Reach Out, Reach In straight through and want more. Leah Klass tells to the bone truth in bold narratives and chewable language. She is a thoroughly American woman who gathered new languages and a layered identity living in many countries. “Understand I am global,” she writes, and we do, seeing through her “inherited pattern recognition” a unifying grasp of culture and language that threads through her own evolution from childhood to maturity. These brave poems move with a strong beat, riding on a wide and inclusive heart. They illuminate so much of a woman’s experience through the stages of her life. For Klass, a fierce advocacy for all people developed, rooted in connection and kindness, and in her passion for acts big and small in families and communities that count toward healing the world. — Rae Latham

Reach Out, Reach In, the debut chapbook from Leah Klass is now available as an ebook [UPDATED September 29, 2023)

October 25, 2021

Printed Matter Vancouver is proud to present the debut chapbook from Leah Klass. Recently relocated from Portland to Ann Arbor, Michigan, Leah is a poet, community activist, global connector, and World Peace Fellow. Hers is the first book of poetry Printed Matter Vancouver has published featuring a writer who lives outside of Southwest Washington.

We are pleased to report that you can now purchase Reach Out, Reach In as an ebook. Please note that due to the unconventional formatting of this chapbook it is best read in landscape/horizontal view.

Order now: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09K1HRGF6/

The debut collection of poetry by Leah Klass tells stories of discovering empathy through human connection. Her work is a rallying call to value our everyday interactions with other people. Reach Out, Reach In offers concrete ideas for transforming the world into a warmer, more welcoming place.

Reach Out, Reach In

By Leah Klass

Published by Printed Vancouver

October 25, 2021

Cover Art & Design by Mercer Hanau

Edited by Toni Lumbrazo Luna and Christopher Luna

ASIN: ‎ B09K1HRGF6
ISBN-13‏: ‎ 979-8985129106

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR REACH OUT, REACH IN

How we are made is how we see, and from the rich mosaic of her background Leah Klass delivers kaleidoscopic poems that will persuade your vision to see this world made strange and precious. This book offers local beginnings, global consciousness, and the courage to use language for what it needs to do: sustain the sovereign self engaged in connecting the private life to the public world. Enter this book troubled, then emerge knowing “there is another way.” — Kim Stafford, author of Singer Come from Afar

I read Reach Out, Reach In straight through and want more. Leah Klass tells to the bone truth in bold narratives and chewable language. She is a thoroughly American woman who gathered new languages and a layered identity living in many countries. “Understand I am global,” she writes, and we do, seeing through her “inherited pattern recognition” a unifying grasp of culture and language that threads through her own evolution from childhood to maturity. These brave poems move with a strong beat, riding on a wide and inclusive heart. They illuminate so much of a woman’s experience through the stages of her life. For Klass, a fierce advocacy for all people developed, rooted in connection and kindness, and in her passion for acts big and small in families and communities that count toward healing the world. — Rae Latham 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Born in Washington, D.C., Leah’s education has included attending diverse public schools and studying abroad. She learned Spanish in the homes of her friends in Falls Church, Virginia. In high school she turned 16 on a secular kibbutz, where she worked on the assembly line in an olive factory and was chased by ostriches. She later waitressed and cleaned houses to help pay for her studies in Anthropology at the University of Virginia which included a year of study abroad in Brazil. She completed a master’s degree in International Peace and Conflict Resolution at the University of Queensland thanks to a Rotary Fellowship in Argentina and Australia. 

She spent the first years of her career bringing businesses from different countries together and encouraging friendships between strangers. Market research and report writing were a ticket to long weekends in Chile and high speed taxi rides in Mexico. She has also helped get social services to migrant communities, taught students how to better network and facilitated group discussions for international business people.

Leah’s greatest pleasures are making connections and reaching out to build community. Speaking many languages allows her to communicate with more people. She speaks Spanish, Portuguese and some Hebrew and German. She is committed to valuing intergenerational relationships and amplifying kindness. 

After becoming a mother, Leah experienced a great shift in her understanding of the world and felt an overwhelming desire to express her need to build community and to help others find and use their voices. In tandem, she joined a kind and passionate poetry community in Portland, Oregon. With the support of the group, poetry has become a way for her to tell stories and to activate others to go out and do something good.

Learn more at www.leahklass.com.

Do Not Abandon Her, a Poem for the Girls in Afghanistan By Leah Klass

August 20, 2021

Do Not Abandon Her

By Leah Klass 

August 16th, 2021

Listen, love, it’s bright outside those plastic blinds

don’t waste your time in turning open aching palms

step straight up off cotton cushions into rainbowed reeds

I’m here just off the path, treading lightly as the signs said no, 

no worries, just a breeze, the scent of leaflings curling open, purr of sandhill cranes beyond

Simone had told me that the frogs croak while the trees sway in the wind

I’d thought to step outside, catch my breath, it was too loud inside the house

and then I saw you, in my dream, lounging, alight on silken robes

smoke rising from your silver pipe and she was there, dear Leah Lost

aside the crowd, kneeling and more, her begging eyes a sign of times to come

You lie in bed in Lakewood in a room I’ve seen just once, 

pine bed posts tall and covers white, the carpets now tell tales of puppies, kids

your forehead freckled, red and wet and wild hair spread cross the sheets

you tell me little and I understand your fear is real

In this day Kabul has fallen and I long to walk straight to the White House

from this quiet pondside all my army of mosquitoes chasing

crickets and cicadas sing and cheer as I walk through Black Lives Matter Plaza 

gaining speed past iron gates, flash something at the guards, my tits, my ass, my empathy and entering that old colonial symbol of hypocrisy: no place for the people but The Person, take myself right up the red real-carpet stairs and turning left (I always do)

march up to you, your thin skin like the surface of a pudding oh, evoking kindness 

as the image of my grandpa would

 

Wait: this is my training, I am loyal to belief and so I tell you what to do, I tell you 

here’s my name, YOUR NAME, and my solemn promise

here’s my address and civil state: I believe in goodness, kindness, safety, light and 

freedom from hunger and misogyny, abuse and ignorance 

but no time to explain Dear Joe

I know you’ve read the news 

it’s time to act straight from our heart, 

Gaia, Collective Earth, the Mother she is rising

I lie in bed and look out at the plastic window blinds

as I wake my hands are clenched, my jaw is tired

all I know is what I am, all I am is what I must

This day I will call the White House, ask to sponsor 

I have room in my heart for as many girls

as they can send. 


Act now: https://www.whitehouse.gov/get-involved/write-or-call/

What Women‘s Advocacy Groups Worldwide Are Doing For Women In Afghanistan by Josie Fischels

https://www.npr.org/2021/08/16/1027929275/what-womens-advocacy-groups-worldwide-are-doing-for-women-in-afghanistan