Publisher's Synopsis
The My Life Matters Project: Poetically Reclaiming & Reframing Our Lives is an ecclectic collection of poetry, prose, photograpy, and original illustrations created by participants in the My Life Matters program. This program grew out of artistic expression workshops held with over 30 youth participants during a six-week summer camp for "at-risk" youth in 2016, 2017, and 2018. This project took place under the leadership of Shauna Hopkins, the program's director since 2012. Shauna, who earned her B.A. from Fayetteville State University in Psychology, is a master at loving, encouraging and challenging youth to stay "out of trouble and successful in school." The program's annual summer camp, funded entirely by donations, includes three 12-hour days of summer camp activity each week for six weeks between. The MLM Project began with weekly self-expression workshops facilitated by volunteer resident artist and then-UNC Chapel Hill PhD Candidate in the Department of Communication, Sonny Kelly.
Through acting, poetry, storytelling, song, photography, visual art, and dance, participating youth explored their own ideas of self, society, and survival. The goal of this process was to improve positive self-concept, self-efficacy, and social engagement, while developing a deeper understanding of the issues that these youth face in their everyday lives. This happens through regular, real conversations (dialogue) and courageous acts of public creation and communication (performance). By sharing and performing narratives that explore our unique selves, struggles, and solutions, we have invited audience members and readers to experience with us what theater scholar Augusto Boal (1995) calls "the therapeutic stage," where we are all encouraged to imagine new possibilities together.
