This 3 Questions Series offers the chance to learn more about board members, grantees, and longtime supporters of Rhode Island Humanities. In the coming months, we will continue to share these conversations as a window into the people who make up our unique network.
As you join RI Humanities’s board, what do you find most interesting or exciting about the Council’s work? Or what are you hoping to learn more about through your board service?
Rhode Island Humanities provides an especially rich opportunity for me to learn the intricacies of best serving our local and larger communities. With the recently completed Rhode Island Civic Health Index, the Strategic Plan and the DEIA Action Plan, our next work is well in place. The idea of “By and For All Rhode Islanders” is a big one, and I am excited to learn stories of what came before while also sorting it out and putting it together in these new, expansive, forward-looking ways.
How do you interact with Rhode Island’s humanities and cultural sector personally or professionally? Can you share a favorite program, exhibit, project, performance, screening, or other humanities activity you’ve participated in recently and what you took away from that experience?
Over the last four years, a band of community members in and around Bristol has developed an annual celebration called Bristol BookFest. I have been fortunate to be involved in this project since its beginning. Our tagline is: Books. People. Conversation. We have developed three months of humanities-based programming (lectures, craft nights, a concert, a scrimshaw exhibit, an 8-week reading group, a reader’s theater, etc.) connected to one text. The programming reaches into many of Bristol’s community pockets, so we meet our neighbors—both individuals and institutions—and our little town feels bigger to me as a direct result.
Note: Bristol BookFest has been supported in the past in part by RI Humanities grants.
What is it about living in Rhode Island that you find compelling?
The variety of landscape in this state continues to impress itself on me. Likewise, Rhode Island is a small state with a density of experience and heritage and promise that continues to entangle and disentangle and entangle again as we find our ways to one another. There are so many ways to belong here by exploring geographical and cultural landscapes. I have come to learn this little state benefits from the amplification of and attention to the storytelling of our history and its challenges and successes. I love a good festival and a good parade, and I’ve never lived anywhere that does it better than Rhode Island.
