Emma Rosenthal is an artist, writer, educator, reiki practitioner, and human rights activist, living in Southern California, whose work combines art, activism, education and grassroots mobilization. As a person with a disability she is confined, not by her disability but by the narrow and marginalizing attitudes and structures of the society at large.
She is the founder and co-director of The WE Project and Café Intifada. She holds teaching credentials in California and Massachusetts. As an educator her emphasis has been in the areas of bilingual and multicultural education. Her experience as a grassroots organizer, political essayist and speaker has been life long and has included many progressive causes.
Her work seeks to combine art, activism, education and grassroots mobilization. Her poetry and prose is impassioned, sensual, political, life affirming and powerful. In her writing she explores the use of art and literary expression to elicit an ethos more compelling than dogma and ideological discourse, providing new paradigms for community, communion, connection and human transformation.
She has been a featured poet and speaker throughout Southern California at a variety of venues and programs including; The Arab-American Festival, Highways Performance Space, The Autry Museum, Barnes and Nobel, Poetic License, Borders/Pasadena, Beyond Baroque, Freedom Fries Follies (a fundraiser for The Center for the Study of Political Graphics), KPFK, Arts in Action, Chafey College, UC Irvine and Hyperpoets.
She is a regular contributor to The Palestine Telegraph. Her work has appeared in several publications including Lilith Magazine, The Pasadena Star News, The San Gabriel Tribune, The San Gabriel Valley Quarterly, LoudMouth Magazine (CSLA), Coloring Book; An Eclectic Anthology of Multicultural Writers (Rattlecat Press 2003), Muse Apprentice Guild and the Anthology, Shifting Sands, Jewish-American Women Speak Out Against the Occupation, Spring 2010.
Hi Emma, so glad to have found your website again,
I always find your writing so inspiring. I hope all is well with you. Hugs
gaby
By: Gaby on August 10, 2008
at 11:16 pm
Would you consider mentioning my newly-published memoir on your blog? I would be happy to exchange blog feeds as well.
Seven Wheelchairs: A Life beyond Polio was recently released by The University of Iowa Press.
The memoir is a history — an American tale — of my fifty year wheelchair journey after being struck by both bulbar and lumbar poliomyelitis after a vaccine accident in 1959. The Press says Seven Wheelchairs gives “readers the unromantic truth about life in a wheelchair, he escapes stereotypes about people with disabilities and moves toward a place where every individual is irreplaceable.”
Other reviewers have called Seven Wheelchairs “sardonic and blunt,” “a compelling account,” and “powerful and poetic.”
I hope you can mention Seven Wheelchairs on your blog. We all live different disability stories, I know, but perhaps if you find the memoir worthwhile, you might want to recommend the book to others who are curious about what polio or disability in general.
Of course, the book is also available through Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
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Gary Presley http://www.garypresley.com
SEVEN WHEELCHAIRS: A Life beyond Polio
Fall 2008 University of Iowa Press
By: Gary Presley on October 28, 2008
at 7:23 am