Award-winning actor and playwright J.T. Turner inhabits the role of Robert Frost in this historical representation of the poet and his work. Frost welcomes you in to share in heart-breaking and humorous stories of his life, along with some of his most popular poems like “Mending Wall,” “Birches,” “Desert Places,” “The Road Not Taken,” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”
J.T. Turner (SAG-AFTRA, AEA) is an NEK-based, award-winning stage, screen and audio actor, teaching artist, and speaker. He has toured theaters, museums, schools, universities, historical sites, libraries, and senior centers all over the North America with his original one-man shows, including: “Robert Frost, Light and Dark,” “The Adventures of Benjamin Franklin,” “Shakespeare’s Ghost,” “A Visit with C.S. Lewis,” “Charles Dickens in A Christmas Carol,” “John Muir: Father of America’s Parks,” “Washington Irving in ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,’” “A Visit with John Steinbeck,” and “Fitzgerald & Gatsby,” as well as storytelling, mindful movement, and theater education programs.
Thank you to our Statewide Snapshot Partners
The podcast and video series “Deep Dish Conversations” unpacks the issues shaping our world today, especially as it impacts our local communities. Join host and author Jerome Moore as he takes us on a dynamic journey toward becoming “an explorer of social change.”
Mar y virus/Virus and the Sea is a multimodal electronic project that directly responds to the impact of Covid-19 on society and the environment. Poet Tina Escaja shares some of the texts from the project, such as the Poem@ CAPTCHA, which can serve as a test of what subtly makes us human.
Author Phuc Tran will discuss his book, Sigh, Gone: A Misfit’s Memoir of Great Books, Punk Rock, and The Fight To Fit In, and the memoir and writing process. For anyone who has ever felt like they don’t belong, Sigh, Gone shares an irreverent, funny, and moving tale of displacement and assimilation woven together with poignant themes from beloved works of classic literature.
Langston Collin Wilkins returns to the city where he grew up to illuminate the complex relationship between place, identity, and music in Houston’s hip hop culture. Interviews with local rap artists, producers, and managers inform an exploration of how artists, audiences, music, and place interact to create a heritage that musicians negotiate in a variety of ways.
A monument depicting Massasoit welcoming the Pilgrims was installed in Plymouth, MA in 1921 to mark the 300th anniversary of the landing of the English. Historian Jean O’Brien considers if the monument prompts us to reckon with the structural violence of settler colonialism, or further entrenches celebratory narratives of national origins.
With the introduction of AI and constant Zoom meetings, our lives have become more fractured and isolated. In Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time, author Sheila Liming shows us what we have lost to the frenetic pace of digital life, and how to get it back.
Miguel de Cervantes’ DON QUIXOTE DE LA MANCHA, published in Spain, in two parts, in 1605 and 1615, is considered the first “modern” novel. But it is also the novel that invented modernity, with its unending angst and uncertainties and its sense of impeding doom. Internationally-renown, prize-winning scholar Ilan Stavans, author of QUIXOTE: THE NOVEL AND THE WORKS, discusses its origins, structure and characters, and the way it continues to redefine us all.
Have you ever wondered how the internet works, where electricity comes from, or how there’s (mostly) enough water for everyone all the time? Where did these systems comes from, and how do they affect our challenges like inequality and climate change? Join Vermont author and artist Dan Nott for a look at these questions and more as he discusses his new nonfiction graphic novel, Hidden Systems for this all-ages event.
“History” usually implies an accurate account of past events while a “story” is less accurate, embellished by a “storyteller.” With remarkable consistency in the US, our “histories” have been written by white persons, usually men, with little divergence from the narratives of “great works” of a “western canon.” Philip Ewell expands on music’s histories/stories and explains why the common American music curriculum is still segregated along racial lines.
Ray Vega and his quartet present a musical program at the Rutland Free Library demonstrating the elements of Jazz. The ensemble will address the ever changing styles of the music from the Blues to Ragtime to Traditional to Swing to Bebop and beyond. Vega and the members of his ensemble will participate in a question and answer session at the end of their presentation.
Our seasonal “Words in the Woods” program allows Vermonters and visitors to enjoy our state’s natural beauty while listening to and reading literature in the outdoors.
Humanities Camps are filled with reading and writing projects, field trips, and outdoor activities.
We won a 2020 Schwartz Prize for best public humanities programming in the U.S. for Vermont Reads 2019: “March: Book One.”
We supported the Chandler Center for the Arts’ Global Connections Youth Outreach program, which highlights artists from around the world.
Our free public events help bring the power of the humanities to communities across Vermont.
