SNFPHI awardee, theater director, and student of Greek sign language interpreting, Brikena Gishto, will present her project “The Wave in the Mind: A Poetry Workshop in Greek Sign Language,” which gives members of the deaf and hard-of-hearing communities the chance to use visual-kinetic language to compose poetry, while also exploring how this work can challenge and expand the conventions of the poetic form. She will discuss the organizational and educational challenges that she has faced leading poetry workshops in the context of Greek public education and what it takes for literary fora to host poets that come from deaf and hard-of -hearing communities and that create poetry in sign language. In response, faculty from Columbia’s Teachers College will discuss how their research and teaching has been shaped by the cultural production of New York City’s deaf and hard-of-hearing communities.

Image: I dream in Another Language (2017), dir. Ernesto Contreras