News Headlines - April 9, 2019

Sojourner Truth Radio

Today on Sojourner Truth: We continue coverage of our recent trip to Haiti, where the Sojourner Truth team covered the graduation of students from the University of the Aristide Foundation, known as UNIFA. Also, we visited La Saline, in Haiti's Port-au-Prince, where residents say the worst massacre since the brutal Duvalier years took place. The massacres began in November 2018 and are continuing. They are being wrongly reported by mainstream media as resulting from gang warfare and we are told they occur with the knowledge and support of the U.S.-backed Haitian government of Jovenel Moise. Our guests are Judith Mirkinson, President of the National Lawyers Guild in the Bay Area, and Seth Donnelly, a human rights campaigner and teacher in Palo Alto, California. They were part of a human rights delegation to Haiti. We spoke to them while on the ground in Haiti about their experiences. Also, we celebrate National Poetry Month, which is marked in April annually in the United States and Canada. The Academy of American Poets kicked off the month-long celebration in 1996 in order to create awareness and appreciation of poetry. They took inspiration from Black History Month, which is celebrated in February, and Women's History Month, which is celebrated in March. The push to promote National Poetry Month " including the works of Black Women poets like Maya Angelou, Alice Walker and Gwendolyn Brooks " has proven to be successful. Many educators and librarians in the United States have embraced the initiative, including it in their school curriculums and lesson plans. And according to a 2017 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts conducted by the National Endowment of the Arts, the number of poetry readers in the United States has nearly doubled in the past five years, from 6.7 percent of U.S. adults in 2012 to nearly 12 percent in 2017. That means 28 million people read a poem in 2017, the highest number since the first survey was first conducted 16 years ago. In honor of National Poetry Month, we hear from Ron Baca, a teacher and Chicano poet who grew up in Boyle Heights, East Los Angeles and is now based in El Sereno, East Los Angeles.