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Mindful Poetry Moments
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Each year for National Poetry Month, The Well selects a Mindful Poetry Moments Curator who selects the poetry we read, contemplate, and get inspired by each year and with whom we work alongside to develop the theme of each year's collection. This past year, former Cincinnati Poet Laureate Manuel Iris served as our Mindful Poetry Moments 2025 curator. Read about our past curators and their selections for their respective editions below!
Manuel Iris
Theme: Reconciliation, Arriving at The Self
We are living in times of noise and uncertainty. In the face of this, and within it, poetry is a space for silence and calm. A tool to gather the pieces of this sometimes shattered reality and build from them a house in which one can live peacefully, being exactly who one is, what one is, in every way.
Manuel Iris, MPM 2025 Curator
Theme: Ways of Loving, Ways of Giving
The first poem I chose for the 2024 Season of Mindful Poetry Moments was Song by Adrienne Rich, a poem which redefines the word “lonely”—extracts some of the ache we associate with the word and celebrates solitude as fertile ground for artistic creation, adventure, interiority, and communion with nature. In the last stanza, Rich compares herself to a rowboat and the rowboat to “wood, with a gift for burning.” Though I didn’t realize it at the time of choosing, this phrase pointed to the theme of the season—ways of giving.
Haleh Liza Gafori, MPM 2024 Curator
Haleh Liza Gafori
Yalie Saweda Kamara & Rimel Kamran (left to right)
Theme: Our Stories; Our Narrative
The poems we selected called each of us during our time together to encounter every word with our heart, mind, and breath, and recognize how we are each living poems. It was an honor to share a space with such a resilient and beautiful group of storytellers who owned their truth with grace....Whether it was counting our breath with our fingers or silently scribbling poems in our notebooks or smiling softly when a poem resonated with us during our April workshops, we grew as a community. By sharing, we learned to heal. By listening, we learned to connect.
Rimel Kamran, MPM 2023 Curator
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Our programs have been nourishing the community since 2005. In 2019, we became the non-profit, A Mindful Moment.
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