Libby Mislan | Poet
Artist’s Bio:
Libby is a poet and community-based artist in Queens, New York. Her impulse as a poet is to uncover the extraordinary in the ordinary, and to weave together personal, collective and ecological healing. She received her MFA in poetry from Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2018, and in 2019 she was the recipient of an artist grant with Queens Arts Fund to produce Queens Flora, a poetry project about the plants of the Ridgewood Reservoir.
Libby is a firm believer in the power of the arts as a vehicle for collective transformation. In addition to her own creative process, she designs and facilitates arts projects and workshops to engage communities in creative expression. In 2015 she received a grant from Queens Council on the Arts to produce Inside Norman Street, a storytelling and performance project that brought together former strangers living on a single street in Ridgewood, Queens to share their stories and create performance in collaboration with professional musicians and dancers. Currently, Libby works as a teaching artist in New York City public schools with Community-Word Project, City Lore, and Teachers & Writers Collaborative. Drawn to interdisciplinary modes of art-marking, Libby is also a certified leader in InterPlay, an active, creative approach to unlock the wisdom of the body that uses improvisational storytelling, movement and song.
Libby Mislan at City Lore:
Poetry and Songwriting: “Remembering the Past, Honoring the Present, Dreaming the Future”
As the seniors at International High School at Lafayette prepared for graduation, they are in a liminal space between their high school lives, and what comes next. In a survey students completed about what they were interested in exploring thematically during our residency, the majority said they wanted to write about their hopes, fears and dreams for the future, as well as writing about their culture and identity, and reading poems by poets from their home countries. This residency that was born out of this feedback. Students wrote a series of poems that reflect upon the past, the present, and the future, and then complete a micrography self-portrait project incorporating their poems into their visual artworks. Additionally, students collaboratively wrote a class song that affirms an expansive sense of the future. Each class opened with a “global poetry spotlight” featuring an author from a home country shared by some of the student community. They read their work in its original language, and in its English translation. The goals of the residency are to encourage personal introspection and ground in a sense of empowerment about students’ post-high school lives, while also honing creative writing skills and deepening classroom community through ample sharing.
What students and teachers say about Libby:
Coming Soon!
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