EarSay is an artist-driven non-profit arts organization dedicated to nurturing and portraying stories of the uncelebrated. Our projects bridge the divide between documentary and expressive forms in books, exhibitions, on stage, in sound & electronic media. We are committed to fostering understanding across cultures, generations, gender and class, through artistic productions and education. We bring our work to theatres, museums, schools, festivals, universities and prisons. Scroll over the top menu to view projects, get information, shop, etc.
Imperfect Allies: Children of Opposite Sides
New York City: Judith Sloan and Najla Said
September 30, NYU
October 15 Department of Family and Social Medicine at Montefiore/Einstein
Warren Lehrer with Adeena Karasick, Judith Sloan and Monna Sabouri
Jericho’s Daughter and Riveted in the Word
October 9, Pratt Institute Brooklyn, NY
To Make a Reservation please fill out this FORM.
Unitarian Universalist Church 37 Miller Street, BelfastBelfast, Maine
Suggested donation $10 and up. You can make a reservation by emailing [email protected] or just show up at the door!
Acclaimed Palestinian-American and Jewish-American playwrights and performers Najla Said and Judith Sloan present a new work in-progress Imperfect Allies: Children of Opposite Sides. The performance explores Najla and Judith’s relationship as colleagues and friends, using tools of art, diplomacy, and listening in order to work for justice and peace and an end to the carnage in Gaza.
Najla and Judith join award-winning author/designer Warren Lehrer in his multimedia presentation of two new book projects. Jericho’s Daughter is Lehrer’s anti-war, feminist reimagining of the biblical tale of Rahab, the Canaanite “harlot” who lived in a mud hut inside the outer brick wall of Jericho. Riveted in the Word is an electronic book based on the true story of a historian’s hard-fought battle to regain language after a massive stroke.
Interview on WERU radio coming soon.
Brunswick, Maine.
Saturday July 27. Unitarian Universalist Church. Doors Open at 6:30 program starts at 7pm.
To get a ticket Sign up HERE
If you have trouble signing up email [email protected]
Coming soon: September 30th, New York University, NY NY. Join the mailing list to get advance notice.
Imperfect Allies is a project with Judith Sloan, Jewish-American actor, writer, educator, and radio producer and Najla Said, Palestinian-American actor, writer, and activist. This project was conceived several years prior to the current heart- and soul-breaking violence in Palestine/Israel. Our goal is to bring people together by using tools of art, diplomacy, and listening in order to understand each other better, build strategies, and work together. As artists, communicators and healers, Sloan and Said will present a 25-minute performance, followed by a dialogue among all in attendance who wish to stay and participate. To find out about the future of the project please sign up for our mailing list here.
Past Events:
If you missed the radio interview listen here:
Previous events took place in Spring 2024:
April 11, and 17 at City Lore, NYC
April 14, at Art NY Brooklyn, NY (NYC past event-
Friday June 21 at Center for Book Arts, New York New York.
All events were full- there is a waiting list of over 100 people and we will be posting when the next steps take place. Please get on our email newsletter list to find out about next steps.
Judith Sloan and Andrew Griffin Artist Commissioning Grants from NYSCA
(New York State Council on the Arts)
Coming in 2025: A new project of music and theatre focused on Climate Crisis called This Is Not A Drill. We are interviewing people not only about the science but on how they feel about climate issues, and what they are doing. What kind of actions are you taking? We have been interviewing people of many ages, races and cultural backgrounds and from various parts of the world. If you are interesting in being interviewed please email us judith at earsay.org
Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings
Poems written by Adeena Karasick. Book visualized by Warren Lehrer.
Published by Lavender Ink Press. October, 2023.
6.25” x 8” x 96 pages. Hardcover, cloth and 3-color foil stamped paper over boards.
Smythe-sewn, archival paper, black and white interior.
This work is the first collaboration between poet, performer, cultural theorist and media artist Adeena Karasick, and designer/author and vis lit practitioner Warren Lehrer. The book features two poems—written by Karasick, visualized by Lehrer—about re-entering the world after a pandemic that never seems to end.
The title poem, Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings, is an ecstatically wrought, post-Covid celebration/trepidation of openings. It tracks the challenges of opening(s) read through socio-economic, geographic and bodily space. Employing fragmentation, layered language, and sonic wordplay, Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings explores a range of intralingual etymologies of the word “opening,” laced with post-consumerist ironic and erotic language, theoretical discourse, philosophical and Kabbalistic aphorisms. The poem foregrounds language as a material, physical organism of hope—highlighting the concept of opening as an ever-swirling palimpsest of spectral voices, textures, whispers and codes transporting us through passion, politics and pleasure as we negotiate loss and light.
Described in the book as a Panddendum, the second poem, Touching in the Wake of The Virus, navigates how in the wake of the pandemic, we must renegotiate the sense of “touch.” After being in solitude for 2+ years, and riddled with fear of further contamination, it explores the nature of touch; how do we touch, and in what ways; (what’s appropriate, inappropriate, riotous, propriotous), when we are always on the surface of contact. With reference to Derrida’s notion of how touch is fundamental to being human; Touching in the Wake of The Virus asks, can one / ever really touch anything; touch nothing / touch / without being touched / how does one touch without touching, without touching too much, where touching is already too much.
Lehrer’s sensuous, textural, textual rendering explores the same questions as it plays with and diagrams approach/withdrawal, navigating between and through a landscape of barriers and openings, seeking intimacy, daring to touch and be touched. His typographic compositions give form to the interior, emotional, metaphorical, historical and performative underpinnings of both poems. Together, the writing and visuals create a new whole that engages the reader to become an active participant in the experience of the poems. The book is a work of poetry, art, design, performance score and commentary about the shared global and very human experience of being separated and trying our best to come back together.
The book is augmented by a soundtrack recording of both poems performed by Karasick with music by Grammy-award winning composer/musician Frank London.
Buy the Book!
Signed Copies from the Authors
Unsigned Copies from the Publisher
Stay tuned for more info and documentation. . .
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EarSay is delighted to announce the publication of Warren Lehrer and Dennis J Bernstein’s new book Five Oceans in a Teaspoon (Paper Crown Press, September 2019).
Order directly from Publisher!
ADVANCE PRAISE
“Brilliant and beautiful! Thank you for bringing in the new.”Alice Walker, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, author of The Color Purple.
“Bernstein and Lehrer—the Lennon and McCartney of viz-lit—have reunited at the height of their creative powers. Five Oceans in a Teaspoon speaks to the madness, vulnerability, aspiration and language of our time. The gutsiness and raw emotion of the writing, revelatory appeal of the visual compositions, and brevity of the form creates an intensely moving experiential journey.” Steven Heller, Design and Visual Culture Historian, author New York Times Book Review Visuals column
“In the long history of graphic word works, few, if any, have this range and repleteness…A completely virtuosic work.” Johanna Drucker Foremost Vis Lit scholar, Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies, UCLA
“Five Oceans in a Teaspoon re-envisions a poetry memoir via a textual kaleidoscope… Bernstein and Lehrer are the Rodgers and Hart of Visual Poetry.” Bob Holman Poet, poetry activist chronicler, founder: Bowery Poetry Club