Verbal Blend, a spoken-word poetry program housed within the Office of Multicultural Affairs, will host “From the Stage to the Page” with poets Carvens Lissaint and Zora Howard of The Strivers Row on Tuesday, April 29, at 8 p.m. in the Schine Student Center Underground.
Doors will open at 7:30 p.m. Admission is free with a ticket from the Schine Box Office.
“’From the Page to the Stage’ will provide an excellent venue for students to experience how to captivate an audience with their words,” says Cedric Bolton, coordinator for student engagement in the Office of Multicultural Affairs.
Carvens Lissaint
Lissaint is an award-winning performance/teaching artist who has been gracing stages and classrooms around the United States, United Kingdom and the Caribbean. He is the author of “The Inspiration, From: Heart To: Page.” Lissaint has been named one of The Root’s Top 30 performance poets. Some of his performances include on Broadway at the New Amsterdam Theater, the Off Broadway Hip Hop Theater Festival, the 2010 Sundance Film Festival in Utah, the U.S. Green Build Council in Arizona and the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. Most recently, he was featured on the second and third seasons of the hit television series “Verses and Flow” on TV One.
Lissaint will be attending New York University-Tisch School of the Arts for an M.F.A. in acting this fall. He has a degree in acting from the American Academy for Dramatic Arts, and is in his final year at St. Johns University majoring in dramatic arts for film and television.
Zora Howard
Howard is a Harlem-raised writer and actress. Through spoken word poetry, she has been able to perform her work at such venues as the Apollo Theater, the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. Her collaboration with filmmaker Lisa Russell on the short film “Biracial Hair,” based on her original poem of the same title, won an Emmy for Outstanding Advanced Media Interactivity in 2009. Also in 2009, she was named the inaugural New York City Youth Poet Laureate by the Office of the Mayor.
Howard published her first collection of poems, “CLUTCH.” In recognition of both her academic and artistic accomplishments, she was honored as one of Glamour Magazine’s 2011 Amazing Women of the Year. Howard is now in her final year at Yale University, where she is a double major in comparative literature and American studies.
For more information, contact Bolton at 315-443-9676 or ctbolton@syr.edu.
