For all seasons: Philadelphia group spreads love of black writing to community throughout the year.

LORENE CARY (Black Ice, Knopf, 1991) recalls being a young mother rushing through the snow to get to the Celebration of Black Writing in Philadelphia in the '80s, years before she founded the organization that would eventually take it over. "I remember what a tonic Walter Mosley's matter-of-fact discussion about fiction was for my anxiety about writing a novel set in 1855. I walked out of the room calmed. So I was scared. Who wasn't?. Mosley said so." The Celebration, now produced by the Art Sanctuary and 30 community partners, including Black Issues Book Review, has grown from a weekend event that reached 750 participants to a four-season event this year that now hopes to expand beyond the audience of 5,000 it has drawn in recent years. Art Sanctuary is a nonprofit organization housed in the Church of the Advocate, a National Historic Landmark in the heart of North Philadelphia. Here, Cary, founder and acting director of Art Sanctuary, describes the evolution of the Celebration of Black Writing.

Hilary Beard, author--with the queens of tennis--of Venus & Serena: Serving From the Hip: Ten Rules for Living Loving and Winning (Houghton Mifflin Company, March 2005), says: "I should be the poster child for Art Sanctuary's Celebration of Black Writing." A dozen years ago, she came to the celebration at a crucial moment in her writing life. The inspiration and encouragement she found there gave her courage to make the next step toward her writing dreams. This year, she'll read during the Celebration's City Hall lunch series Eat Your Words.

Other writers have been similarly influenced. The husband-and-wife writing team of Nick Chiles and Denene Millner (Money, Power, Respect: What Brothers Think, What Sistahs Know About Commitment (HarperPerennial, 2002) say that attending the Celebration influenced them to write together. Michael Datcher (Raising Fences: A Black Man's Love Story, Riverhead Books, 2002) wrote in 2003 that his time as a featured artist had rejuvenated him in his own work with writers in Los Angeles.

The Celebration has its own story, of course. Larry Robin, owner of Robin's Bookstore, began it in 1984 because he thought black writers were working harder than others to "tell the truth." He also wanted to connect struggling, often isolated, young writers to established ones. When Art Sanctuary took over the Celebration of Black Writing, it was a case of a four-year-old arts organization stretching to wrap its arms around an 18-year-old tradition. Initially, the new producers' ambitions were modest-sounding but open-ended: to maintain or increase the audience of 750; to sink the Celebration's roots deeper into the local black and white reading communities, and to expand its reach throughout the mid-Atlantic region and beyond.

Deepening its roots meant focusing on several constituencies at once. Working to increase visibility, Art Sanctuary buffed up the Lifetime Achievement Award ceremony and added a citywide public lecture. The first event featured Nigerian author Chinua Achebe and filled 2,000 seats in the University of Pennsylvania's huge Irvine Auditorium. Achebe is best known for his book Things Fall Apart (Anchor, 1994) among other novels.

Writers in the Schools

To impact area literacy, Art Sanctuary placed writers into schools, shelters, universities, community colleges and a juvenile detention center. They scheduled readings in venues throughout the city, including their North Philadelphia home, the National Historic Landmark Church of the Advocate. In four years, Art Sanctuary has expanded the weekend conference to a three-week festival with more than 50 authors, 30 community partners and 5,000 participants.

Highlights have included gala Lifetime Achievement Award ceremonies, and former honorees include Samuel Allen, Amiri Baraka, Charles Fuller, Eloise Greenfield, Kristin Lattany and Sonia Sanchez. Among other memorable events were a black sci-fi panel in 2003 with Steven Barnes, Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany, Tananarive Due and Askia Toure at the Franklin Institute of Science Planetarium; and a searing reading in 2004 of black writing about the Vietnam War with poets Yusef Kumunyakaa, Lamont Steptoe and memoirist Albert French.

As always, however, growth creates its own issues. Besides the ongoing challenge to raise funds to keep pace with increased costs, Art Sanctuary's biggest worries began to revolve around its February schedule. Moreover, in evaluations, program participants themselves kept a running commentary about the wisdom--or lack of it--of black organizations helping to stuff black activity into one month. Concerned that a change of season would alienate its core audience, last year Art Sanctuary made the case explicitly in Celebration's program brochure:

"After evaluations, conversations, snowed-out and iced-out days, hundreds of e-mails and phone call suggestions, we at Art Sanctuary want to engage our now 5,000 participants in another chapter of the Celebration's life: a change of season. Twenty-one years ago, before de rigueur book tours, before the vigorous programming that is now Black History Month, and when the conference was a two-day, not a two- or three-week gig, February was the most logical time. Now, it's the toughest time to engage the writers you want. It's an airline nightmare. And Russian roulette with weather delays. What do you think?

The answer: "Change it," participants said, "but don't evacuate February completely!"

Queen of Black Arts

The answer is this year's Four Seasons Celebration, a comprehensive program divided into seasonal units, which Art Sanctuary hopes will prove less hectic and more doable for a full-time staff of five.

To help the Four Seasons cohere--at least in this first year--Art Sanctuary links the parts with a season-long, living, breathing, singing, shouting, loving community consideration of one artist: Sonia Sanchez.

After close to 30 years in her adopted city, Sanchez is Philadelphia's poet and prophet; author of more than 16 books, including poetry (Shake Loose My Skin, Beacon Press, 2000), (Does Your House Have Lions?, Beacon Press, 1997), plays, children's books and short stories; professor emeritus of Temple University; the distinctly female voice of the Black Arts Movement (BAM); activist; and mother.

Season 1: Fall began with a jazz and poetry opening and a celebration of hip-hop and youth. There was "Sonia for Children," a matinee reading of Sanchez's children's books and her work with students to write peace poems. Hip-hop artists also went to high schools for two- and three-part residencies. A teachers workshop by Dr. James Peterson, professor of English and American Studies, Pennsylvania State University/Abington, considered violence in hip-hop and premiered a new Web-based curriculum, Hip-Hop 101, created by a University of Penn intern Laura Smith.

Season 2: February brings a not-to-be-missed Celebration of Sonia Sanchez and other Black Arts Movement legends. Performances by Sanchez and The Last Poets on Friday, February 10, lead up to the all-day panel discussion, workshops and book fair on Saturday, February 11. Also on Saturday, South African poet Dennis Brutus (A Simple Lust, Heinemann, 1973) and poet and Vietnam vet Lamont Steptoe, a winner of this year's Before Columbus Foundation's American Book Award for A Long Movie of Shadows (Whirlwind Press, 1994), will convene their 20-year-running Meeting of the Union of African Writers.

Art Sanctuary will feature a lunchtime production by Philadelphia Young Playwrights, a unique program that sends playwrights into schools--and then oversees hundreds of productions. In addition, Art Sanctuary will dispatch authors to more than 30 classrooms.

Season 3: Spring's Celebration features a collaboration with the Network for New Music's Poetry Project. Four composers' original compositions based on Sanchez's haiku will premiere on March 19.

Reading in Concert, Art Sanctuary's collaboration with the University of Pennsylvania, will send 10 to 15 Penn students to public and private schools, alternative adult learning centers, book groups and shelters. After six weeks of studying Sanchez's Home-girls and Handgrenades (Thunder's Mouth Press, 1984), the 200 participants gather for Ms. Sanchez's final reading of the season.

Season 4: Summer celebrates black film with screenings inside the Sanctuary and shown outside for viewing in lawn chairs.

Lorene Cary is an author, visiting lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania and founder of the Art Sanctuary. She also wrote The Price of a Child (Knopf, 1995). (See "The City That Reads Together...," BIBR, November-December 2005.)

For an expanded schedule and updates, log on to www.bibookreview.com.