World-Renowned Poets Ellen Bass, Jane Hirshfield and Marie Howe to Give Poetry Reading in Support of the Courageous Students of the Safe House Education (S.H.E.) Fund for Maasai Girls

On February 15, 2020, three renowned poets will join voices to offer and unforgettable evening of poetry in support of the Safe House Education (S.H.E.) Fund for Maasai Girls. This event will be a rare opportunity to hear three of the greatest voices of modern poetry in one event. Bass, Hirshfield and Howe are or have been Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets. Their poems have summoned a generation of poets into a terrain of uncompromising honesty at the interface between the holy and the human.

On February 15, their power will bring people together to change the lives of young women in Kenya through donations to the S.H.E. Fund.

About the Poets

“Ellen Bass shows us that we are as radiant as we are ephemeral, that in transience glistens resilient history and the remarkable fluidity of connection. Following her musings on suicide and generosity, desire and repetitionit becomes lucidly clear that Bass is not only a poet but also a philosopher and a storyteller.” Briana Shemroske, Booklist

“Jane Hirshfield, in poems described by The Washington Post as belonging among the modern masters and by The New York Times as passionate and radiant, addresses the urgent immediacies of our time. Ranging from the political, ecological, and scientific to the metaphysical, personal, and passionate, Hirshfield praises the radiance of particularity and the consequence of the daily. Her poems and essays traverse the crises of the biosphere and social justice, abiding in the intersections of facts and imagination, desire and loss, impermanence and beauty – all the dimensions of our existence within what one poem calls ‘the pure democracy of being.'” The Steven Barclay Agency

“Marie Howe‘s poetry is luminous, intense, and eloquent, rooted in an abundant inner life. Her long, deep-breathing lines address the mysteries of flesh and spirit, in terms accessible only to a woman who is very much of our time and yet still in touch with the sacred.” Stanley Kunitz

Kim Rosen, Founder and Executive Director of the S.H.E. Fund and poet will also be speaking at the event.

About the S.H.E. Fund

The Safe House Education (S.H.E.) Fund provides girls of the V-Day Safe House in Narok, Kenya with college, university or trade school education in order to support these young women to become change-makers in their communities and stop the cycles of oppression of women (Female Genital Mutilation, Early Childhood Marriage and the refusal to educate females) in their culture and on our planet.

Proceeds from the event will support students like Salula, who was rescued at the age of eight from a forced marriage to a 46 year-old man; Eunice, who rode on the back of an older boy’s bike through the night to get to the Safe House to avoid being married off; and Agnes and Mercy, two sisters who fled FGM together, hid for three days in a police woman’s house, then were taken to the Safe House. Today these students are going to college and living their dreams. They and other S.H.E. students are the first people in their villages to get a college education. Their example is changing what it means to be a woman in their tribe.