Oakland to Ghana
In 2017, a group of Oakland poets and a group of West African poets from the Ghanaian organization of Ehalakasa wrote poems together for a year under the lead of Karla Brundage and Sir Black. At the end of that year, the Oakland poets traveled to Ghana to meet their partners and compete in a poetry slam. Part travelogue, part celebration, Our Spirits Carry Our Voices tells the story of this journey through prose and poetry.
Hawaii to Ghana – Strong Women
The idea for this collection, Sisters Across Oceans, was inspired by the much needed conversation between influential Black women across the diaspora. Poet-activist Karla Brundage, founder of West Oakland to West Africa (WO2WA) and editor of Our Spirits Carry Our Voices, expanded her original vision of connectivity across the African Diaspora to Hawaii. In collaboration with the Links Inc., Hawaii Chapter and Ehalakasa, West Oakland to West Africa hosted an eight-week poetry exchange between women in Hawaii, California, and Ghana. Many of the writers in this book have been previously published, and all are outstandingly successful in the arts, their communities, and their professions.
EO2EA (East Oakland to Kenya) & WO2WA (West Oakland to Nigeria)
The 2021 poetry exchange session combined two different groups. EO2EA, or East Oakland to East Africa, featured a partnership between East Oakland’s Patrice Lumumba Writing Collective and the Kistrech Poetry Festival in Kenya. While the WO2WA exchange featured a partnership between West Oakland poets and the Cultural Intellectual Association (CIA-Lagos), a non-profit, non-governmental organization dedicated to promoting creativity in the Nigerian performance arts, visual arts, architecture and urbanism.