"The Power of Words at Goddard College in the fall of 2018...in the midst of the unpredictability of daily life, for a few precious days I found myself surrounded by beauty, reminded yet again how art and wordcraft are not luxuries, to paraphrase Audre Lorde, but tools for survival, 'sanctuaries and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas.'

"We think and language into existence, whether our language takes the shape of words, images, sounds, or movements, summoning new worlds with our breath and our bodies. And as we come together to share we move away from isolation and fear and into one another, drawing close to the hearth where we warm and nourish ourselves before heading back out.

"This is the power of words -- that something so fragile, awkward, limited and limiting can, in the end, still be a way in: a key in a lock, a warm breeze signaling an end to winter's slumber, a torch to light the way."

— Shomriel Sherman

2019 Keynoters

Gregg Levoy

Gregg Levoy is the author of Vital Signs: The Nature and Nurture of Passion (Penguin), and Callings: Finding and Following An Authentic Life (Random House) –rated among the "Top 20 Career Publications" by the Workforce Information Group and a text in various graduate programs in Management and Organizational Leadership. He is a former "behavioral specialist" at USA Today, and a regular blogger for Psychology Today.

A former adjunct professor of journalism at the University of New Mexico, former columnist and reporter for USA Today and the Cincinnati Enquirer, and author of This Business of Writing (Writer’s Digest Books), he has written for the New York Times Magazine, Washington Post, Omni, Psychology Today, Christian Science Monitor, Fast Company, Reader’s Digest, and many others, as well as for corporate, promotional and television projects. He lives in Asheville, North Carolina, and his website is www.gregglevoy.com

Noa Baum

Usha Akella

Usha has authored three books of poetry, one chapbook, and scripted and produced one musical drama. She is pursuing a Masters in Creative Writing at Cambridge University, UK. She read with a group of eminent South Asian Diaspora poets at the House of Lords in June 2016. Her work has been included in the Harper Collins Anthology of Indian English Poets. Her recent book The Rosary of Latitudes carries a foreword by Keki Daruwalla. She was selected as a Cultural Ambassador for the City of Austin for 2015. She has been published in numerous Literary journals, and has been invited to prestigious international poetry festivals in Slovakia, Nicaragua, Macedonia, Colombia, Slovenia, India etc. She is the founder of ‘Matwaala,’ the first South Asian Diaspora Poets Festival in the US.

Usha has won literary prizes (Nazim Hikmet award, Open Road Review Prize and Egan Memorial Prize), and enjoys interviewing artists, scholars, and poets for reputed magazines. She has written a few quixotic nonfiction prose pieces published in The Statesman and India Currents. She is the founder of the Poetry Caravan in New York and Austin which takes poetry readings to the disadvantaged in women’s shelters, senior homes, hospitals. Several hundreds of readings have reached these venues via this medium. The City of Austin proclaimed January 7th as Poetry Caravan Day.