Celebrating Bethlehem's Southside Culture
“Colors”: Spoken Word Performance “Colors” Lyrics I’m grateful every morning I don’t wake up a #hashtag A trending Topic of tragedy A black and brown body Outlined in white, red blood watering concrete Because of shades of blue White lies defining how Black Lives Matter My God There’s a war on colors Ever since we…
“To be black in America right now is a wound. Nothing seems to exactly describe the pain in my lower back, my chest, blooming between my lungs, hanging so, so heavy in my heart. My grief is miles deep, ancestral deep. I think of my father, my brother, my sister. I think of both of…
As part of the ongoing programming for Festival Unbound 2020, Touchstone Theatre put together a socially-distanced concert, called “Songs of Hope and Resistance,” to champion “diversity, community, and freedom” in the Lehigh Valley. The Touchstone ensemble felt that the pandemic and the urgent struggle for racial justice must be marked by music. Music provides our…
Joe Talbot’s debut film, “The Last Black Man in San Francisco,” is a whimsical love letter to Talbot’s childhood friend Jimmie Fails and Talbot’s home, the San Francisco Bay Area. Closely mirroring the life of Jimmie Fails, who played himself in the film, the story takes up considerations of male friendship, toxic masculinity, identity, home…
As part of their digital events series during the Covid-19 period, Touchstone Theatre is offering “deep listeners of the Lehigh Valley and beyond” an absurd, hilarious, and suspenseful radio play called “Iso/Nation Presents.” The radio play is part of Touchstone’s “Fresh Voices” program and is made by Sean Patrick Cassidy and Adam Ercolani, Touchstone Theatre’s…
This featured photo, “Southside Public Library,” by Ryder Griffith at Southside Proud, is licensed by CC. BY-NC 2.0. Bethlehem Area Public Library (BAPL) is taking action on the call by the Black Lives Matter movement and The Fight 4 Black Lives to have difficult conversations about race and racism in our communities and across America….
On June 25th, Artsquest and Steelstacks hosted another “Levitt in Your Living Room” free concert to share the “sultry sound, clear tone, [and] funky groove” of Gina Chavez. The concert, shared on a live stream from Gina Chavez’s living room, featured Chavez playing as a one-woman band, and interacting with listeners through chat on Facebook….
This featured photo, “Roxanne Gay – Montreal – 2015” by Eva Blue is licensed by CC. BY 2.0. On Tuesday, June 16th, Bethlehem community members worked through the brutally honest reflections in Roxane Gay’s memoir Hunger. The Queer Memoir Reading Group discussion was hosted by Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center, and supported by Lehigh University Humanities…
Despite my fear of sharing personal stories, Waxler created a space where vulnerability was not something to be feared, but something to be explored with kindness toward one’s self and other participants…
By the end of Barack Obama’s term as the President of the United States, former chief official White House photographer Pete Souza had captured those eight years in a collection of two million photos. Three hundred of these photos make up his best-selling photography book, Obama: An Intimate Portrait, and it was that visual narrative…