Honoring Heroes Close to Home This Veteran’s Day
As we celebrate our veterans today, we’re proud to share that Lovella Calica served as a keynote speaker this afternoon at BEN-FM’s Woman of the Week luncheon at the Kimmel Center’s Hamilton Garden. Lovella is a woman of many talents – a writer, photographer, multimedia artist, and founder of Warrior Writers, a creative writing workshop designed to help veterans heal in their life after war.
Participants from Warrior Writers were also present at the event. These veterans have begun working with the Kimmel Center in preparation of Holding it Down: The Veterans Dream Project, an event that will be part of PIFA 2016. The multimedia production was created by Grammy-nominated pianist-composer Vijay Lyer and poet-performer-librettist-emcee Mike Ladd in which they focus on veterans of color from the last decade’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This new work combines music, poetry, song, video monologues, and visuals, created from the actual dreams of young veterans.
There will be a number of additional community programs leading up to PIFA meant to help honor and heal our local veterans. We thank Lovella for her inspiring words today and we thank all of our veterans for their service.