Poet, actress and playwright Helena D. Lewis came to Wilkes University on March 18 and 19 as a part of the Allan Hamilton Dickson Spring Writer Series.
Lewis is famous for her award-winning one-person show “Call Me Crazy: Diary of a Mad Social Worker,” in which she chronicles her career in social work portraying 25 different characters.
She has also written a play titled, “Shenanigans,” which premiered at the DownTown Urban Arts Theater Festival (DUATF) in New York. Lewis is currently working on a new one-person show based on her work with incarcerated women.
Lewis started her two-day visit at the university by stopping by in Dr. Larry Kuhar’s English 303 Poetry workshop course. In this session, Lewis taught the students about the value and catharsis of performative arts. She noted this as her sole reason for beginning to write poetry on top of working as a social worker.
Lewis began to perform and read out her poems which dealt with themes such as COVID-19, her personal family trauma and personal experiences as a social worker.
Later that evening, Lewis held a reading of some of her poems. The crowd was delighted by both Lewis’s enthusiastic reading and performative style. During this session, Lewis noted that she will also be making a collection of poems which would be her first collection to be published outside of a stage setting.
On March 19 at 1 p.m., Lewis held a workshopping session in room 108 in Kirby Hall. Lewis presented a PowerPoint presentation on the concept of art being transformative. Among many elements, Lewis emphasized the importance of implementing personal experiences and its connection artwork of all forms.
She informed attendees on “scriptotherapy” and “ethnography,” which are ideas that connect the self as well as human behavior and how an artist or writer can create the surroundings within them and around that and transform those elements into something artistic.
Lewis is the second writer visiting Wilkes University through the Allan Hamilton Dickson Spring Writing Series.
George Saunders will be the final guest writer and will be coming to Wilkes on April 15 at 7 p.m. He will be speaking at the Darte Center. Registration for this event is required.
To learn more about Helena D. Lewis, visit her website hdlpoet.com.
