FRIDAY HEADLINE EVENT Friday, October 16th 2009

Urban Village Arts Series (UVAS) The Urban Village Arts Series (UVAS) invites artists to downtown
Lowell to give short performances or talks about their work.
7-9pm Novelists, non-fiction writers, sculptors, filmmakers, painters, poets,
and contemporary and classical musicians have given stunning
Lowell High School Auditorium, 50 Father Morissette Blvd. performances during Lowell’s three years of hosting the series.
Designed to be a dynamic, compact presentation of local, regional
Mestre Calango and national talent, UVAS supports working artists by connecting
of Capoeira Rosa them with an audience that will appreciate and support their talents.
Rubra. (Left) It also encourages students and faculty of UMass Lowell to come to
Mestre Calango downtown as performers and audience members while reaching out
of Capoeira Rosa
to residents and regional audiences. Members of the Lowell Poetry
Rubra plays
the traditional Network and Bootstrap Productions organize and produce between
Capoeira four and six UVAS shows per year.
instrument known
as the berimbau. Mestre Calango
(right)
Photos by Anna
Mestre Calango began playing Capoeira as a teen in Brazil. He has been practicing
Isaak-Ross
and teaching Capoeira, as well as fitness and rehabilitation, to students of all ages and
abilities for nearly 30 years. Almost 120 years have passed since the end of slavery
in Brazil, but much of the suffering still resounds in Brazilian life and culture. Slaves
trained and remained ready for rebellion through a connection to their African roots
now known as Capoeira. Out of necessity, they disguised the fighting art of Capoeira
as a dance with accompanying instruments and a method of constant movement
known as the ginga. From this basis of movement and readiness a Capoeirista may
respond to or escape from whatever comes his/her way—be it in the roda or in
everyday life. Mestre Calango was a professor of Capoeira in Oliveira and Minas
Gerais where he organized groups that performed in various countries around the
world. At the moment, more than fifty students are enrolled in the Academia de
Michael Casey, Capoeira Rosa Rubra in Lowell, Newton, Brookline and Amesbury, MA. Anyone aged
Jessica Smith, eight or older is welcome to come and learn this beautiful, practical and spiritual art
& Caleb Neelon with from Mestre Calango. Please visit CapoeiraRosaRubra.com for more information.
his art.
Michael Casey

Michael Casey was born in 1947 in Lowell, Massachusetts. He received a B.S. in

Physics from Lowell Technological Institute where he took a class with poet William
Aiken. He’s also studied at SUNY, Buffalo, with poets John Logan, Irving Feldman
and William Sylvester. He was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1968 and his stay at
Fort Leonardwood, Missouri, provided the fodder for his later collection, The
Million Dollar Hole. In his first collection, Obscenities, Casey writes of his work as
military police officer in Vietnam’s Quang Ngai Province. Obscenities won the 1972
Yale Younger Poets Award, chosen by Stanley Kunitz, and sold over 200,000 copies.
He’s published the following collections: Millrat (Adastra Press), The Million Dollar
Hole (Orchises Press), Raiding a Whorehouse (Adastra), Permanent Party (March
Street Press), Cindi’s Fur Coat (The Chuckwagon), and The Bopper (Kendra Steiner
Editions). For more on Casey see the above presses online or see Bridge Review:
Ecommunity.uml.edu/bridge/review4/casey/index.htm.

Jessica Smith

Originally from Birmingham, Alabama, Jessica Smith received her B.A. and M.A.
from SUNY Buffalo, where she was the Founding Editor of the poetry magazine
name and won the Academy of American Poets Prize twice. Smith is the author
of one full-length collection of poetry, Organic Furniture Cellar. She teaches
writing at SUNY Buffalo and Medaille College and since 2001 her work has been
published in dozens of magazines including apocryphaltext, Cannibal, dANDe-
lion, ixnay, Phoebe, Small Press Traffic and in three anthologies. Her poetry has
been translated into Turkish, Swedish, Icelandic and Danish. Chapbooks include
bird-book (Detumescence), The Plasticity of Poetry and Telling Time (No Press),
Shifting Landscapes (above/ground press), butterflies (Big Game Books), and
What the Fortune-Teller Said (dusie/a+bend). Smith is also known as an editor
for her work with the monthly women’s broadzine Foursquare, which was recently
on view at the Handmade/Homemade exhibit of small press publishing. Smith
now resides in Buffalo—a city Robert Creeley called “the last place you can be
Bohemian.” Jessica Smith’s work can be accessed online: Looktouch.com.

Caleb Neelon

Caleb Neelon is based in Cambridge, MA, and is an artist, writer, and educator.
His paintings and installation artwork have appeared in solo and group shows in
America and Europe. His vivid murals sprawl across walls in Kathmandu, Reykjavik,
Bermuda, Calcutta, São Paulo and all over Europe. He is co-author of the Thames
and Hudson book Graffiti Brasil as well as Street World from Thames and Hudson,
Abrams. Neelon is the author and illustrator of the children’s book Lilman Makes a
Name for Himself, and has been a collaborator on nearly a dozen other books. He
is an editor at the popular culture hardbound bi-monthly Swindle, and has been a
contributing writer at Tokion, Print, Juxtapoz, On The Go, Lemon and many other
magazines and journals. Neelon has lectured at international conferences and festivals
as well as Harvard Law School, Bates College, Northeastern University and his alma
mater the Harvard Graduate School of Education. A monograph of his work, Caleb
designed by Malden High School’s Neelon’s Book of Awesome, was recently released by Gingko Press. He dislikes
winter weather. For more on Neelon, check out: Theartwheredreamscometrue.com
Blue and Gold staff