Authors' Night | Fundraiser Matthew Whitaker, Cynthia Hogue
and Photographer, Rebecca Ross

Wednesday, December 8, 2010
6 to 8pm

Nina Mason Pulliam Rio Salado Audubon Center
3131 S. Central Ave.
Phoenix, AZ 85040

Coffee & Dessert Reception

$50 per person, $25 per student

Click here to register or call Julie Gavin at 602-257-0335 x25

Matthew Whitaker, Cynthia Hogue, and Rebecca Ross explore the journey of Hurricane Katrina evacuee’s grief and hope through stories, poems and photographs. Their works create portraits of individual lives profoundly touched by trauma and tragedy which forces us to examine our own views on human relations, public policy and quality of life.

When the Water Came: Evacuees of Hurricane Katrina. Interview-poems by Cynthia Hogue; photographs by Rebecca Ross.

When the Water Came: Evacuees of Hurricane Katrina features interview-poems and photographs of Hurricane Katrina evacuees who passed through, evacuated, or relocated to Arizona. The book tracks twelve individual journeys from Louisiana to Phoenix in the kind of precise detail that emerges in a personal interview, making the particular story vivid. As artist-witnesses, we listened attentively, observed closely, heard and saw with empathy. As analytic artists, we investigated how someone survives the shock of catastrophe—of dislocation, loss of intimacy, loss of community and the ways one had of making a living. Hogue created poems from interviews with evacuees, using only the interviewees’ words, re-ordered and shaped formally and visually to communicate the depth of these individual experiences, and to highlight the poetry of their language. Through black-and-white, medium format photographs, Ross examined evacuees’ recreated present and retraced their steps to relate a poignant sense of journey and beginning again. Responding to the itinerant nature of the evacuees who participated in this project, the artists document both the new lives begun in the desert and the remnants of Gulf Coast roots. Their vision was to weave poems and photographs together to create portraits of individual lives profoundly touched by trauma and tragedy, but the series tells a universal story of broken lives and the courage to begin anew.

Hurricane Katrina: America’s Unnatural Disaster. Edited and with an introduction by Jeremy I. Levitt and Matthew C. Whitaker.

On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast states of Louisiana and Mississippi. The storm devastated the region and its citizens. But its devastation did not reach across racial and class lines equally. In an original combination of research and advocacy, Hurricane Katrina: America’s Unnatural Disaster questions the efficacy of the national and global responses to Katrina’s central victims, African Americans. This collection of polemical essays explores the extent to which African Americans and others were, and are, disproportionately affected by the natural and manmade forces that caused Hurricane Katrina. Such an engaged study of this tragic event forces us to acknowledge that the ways in which we view our history and life have serious ramifications on modern human relations, public policy, and quality of life.

Thank you to our sponsor