Veteran Artist Spotlight: Joe Merritt
“This work saved my life. After I was retired from USMC, I started facilitating poetry and art workshops in military spaces. We had an amazing group of artistic visionaries on the team. I got to watch those workshops expand and grow and touch thousands of lives. There was never a doubt about the effectiveness of it. So, when the time came going into the non-profit sector made the most sense. The work that’s being done still amazes me.” -Joe Merritt, CBAW Co-Founder
Giving Belonging, Receiving Community
Among the most awkward – but most important – things we’ve had to do to sustain and grow Community Building Art Works is ask our friends and supporters for the money necessary to run our programming. But from the start, in order to expand our reach and pay our artists, we have always needed the help of our community.
Fortunately, we have some pretty great friends, so we haven’t had to do it alone.
This year we had the immense privilege of working with the incredibly generous and talented team at Be The Change Revolutions. Human connection is at the heart of our shared work, and BTC has been our partner in launching #MissionBelonging, our initiative to make the world a little less lonely.
Earlier this year, BTC Revolutions agreed to bring aboard their people-centered approach to communications to help with our giving season fundraising campaign. Their support, through both sponsorship and guidance, was a gift that multiplied itself throughout our #GiveBelonging campaign. This gift continues to grow even now as we near the end of the year.
In his book The Gift, Lewis Hyde explains that while a commodity is purchased and used up when it is consumed, a gift increases each time it is passed between giver and recipient. Each member of our community knows this. Our teaching artists share their craft, our participants multiply it by sharing their work, their truths, multiplying the potential of art.
BTC Revolutions captured the spirit of our work in a campaign that embodied Hyde’s concept of how gifts grow as they circulate through a community. When CEO Amanda Hite and Chief Intelligence Officer Brandon Hill, co-founders of BTC Revolutions, personally stepped in to plan this campaign with us, they encouraged us to lean into the support of our community. They inspired us to ask a group of community members what belonging meant to them, and to encourage and empower CBAW supporters to set up their own fundraisers online and in their offline communities.
Our friends and supporters responded to this call to raise funds for #GiveBelonging. This approach not only helped us exceed our goal, but gave us a way to involve our supporters, sharing our work in a meaningful way with some of the people who matter most to us, and giving them the tools to share our work with the people who matter to them.
Amanda and Brandon’s strategic advice let us empower our supporters to share our message with the people in their network, inspiring others to learn about CBAW and become supporters.
This is just one example of how BTC Revolutions’ support grows as it reverberates through our community.
Because of BTC Revolutions, our dedicated Community Builders who fundraise for us, the support of committed activists like Jeffrey Wright and Kimbal and Christiana Musk and the hundreds of donors who pitched in to make our goal, we will share 10,000 hours of belonging with our community of veterans, health care workers, and civilians with life-giving creative programs next year. We are immensely grateful. We hope you’ll share and multiply this gift with us.
Glowing In The Dark: A Mission Belonging Winter Reading & Gathering
Join us for GLOWING IN THE DARK, a reading to celebrate members of our community, hosted by Seema Reza.
Join CBAW Founder Seema Reza on Wednesday, November 30th at 7pm EST, as she hosts Glowing in the Dark, a winter reading and gathering to celebrate our community of authors as they read from their newly published works. Featured authors include: Ben Weakley, Hari Alluri, Carla Rachel Sameth, Yesenia Montilla, Cynthia Dewi Oka, and Shuly Xóchitl Cawood.
Attend the reading and stay after for Open Studio with Veteran Artist and CBAW Co-Founder, Joe Merritt. Bring anything you want to work on, in any medium, and create art with our community.
About The Poets
Ben Weakley spent fourteen years in the U.S. Army, beginning with deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan and finishing at a desk inside the Pentagon. He writes poetry and prose about the enduring nature of war and the human experience. His first collection of poems, HEAT + PRESSURE is forthcoming in November 2022 from Middle West Press.
Ben’s work appears in the anthologies, Our Best War Stories, by Middle West Press and We Were Not Alone, by Community Building Art Works. Other poems and articles appear or are forthcoming in Sequestrum, Cutleaf Journal, The Wrath-Bearing Tree, and Army University Press., among other publications. His Awards include First Place in the 2019 Heroes’ Voices National Poetry Contest, and Finalist in the 2020 Col. Darron L. Wright Memorial Writing Awards. Ben is also a nominee for the Pushcart Prize. Today, Ben lives in the Tri-Cities of Northeast Tennessee with his wife, their children, and a very mischievous hound dog. You can read more of Ben’s work at https://www.jbenweakley.com.
Hari Alluri (he/him/siya) is the author of The Flayed City (Kaya). A winner of the 2020 Leonard A. Slade, Jr. Poetry Fellowship and an editor at Locked Horn Press, he has received grants from the BC Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts and fellowships from Las Dos Brujas, Port Townsend, and VONA/Voices writers workshops. His work appears in the Watch Your Head (Coach House) and Pandemic Solidarity (Pluto) anthologies, as well as recently in Prism International, Solstice, Tinderbox, The Volta and elsewhere. https://harialluri.com/
Carla Rachel Sameth was recently selected as the Co-Poet Laureate for Altadena, CA 2022-2024. Her chapbook, What Is Left was published December 2021 (dancing girl press) Carla’s award-winning memoir, One Day on the Gold Line will be reissued by Golden Foothills Press in November 2022. Her writing on blended/unblended, queer, multi-racial and single parent families appears in a variety of literary journals, newspapers and anthologies. Carla’s work has been twice named as Notable Essays of the Year in Best American Essays, and nominated for Best of the Net.. Her story “Graduation Day at Addiction High,” which originally appeared in Narratively, was also selected for Longread’s “Five Stories on Addiction.” A Pasadena Rose Poet, a West Hollywood Pride Poet, and a former PEN Teaching Artist, Carla teaches creative writing to high school and university students and has taught incarcerated youth. https://carlasameth.com/
Yesenia Montilla is an Afro-Latina poet & a daughter of immigrants. Her poetry has appeared in Gulf Coast, Prairie Schooner, & others. She received her MFA from Drew University & is a CantoMundo graduate fellow. Her first collection The Pink Box was Longlisted for a PEN award in 2016. Her second collection Muse Found in a Colonized Body (Four Way Books, 2022) is available now. https://www.yeseniamontilla.com/
Cynthia Dewi Oka is the author of Fire Is Not A Country (Northwestern University Press), Salvage: Poems (Northwestern University Press) and Nomad of Salt and Hard Water (Thread Makes Blanket). She’s currently Poet in Residence at the Amy Clampitt House. https://www.cynthiadewioka.com/
Shuly Xóchitl Cawood is the author of several books, including the poetry collection, Trouble Can Be So Beautiful at the Beginning (Mercer University Press, 2021), winner of the Adrienne Bond Award for Poetry. Her forthcoming flash essay collection, What the Fortune Teller Would Have Said, won the 2022 Iron Horse Literary Review Chapbook Competition. Shuly has an MFA in creative writing and an MA in journalism. She loves teaching writing workshops, hiking in the woods, and watching trashy TV. Learn more about her at https://www.shulycawood.com.
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