Felicia Rice and Theresa Whitehill will bring the Heavy Lifting Listening Tour to their friends in Santa Cruz. The Heavy Lifting Listening Tour aspires to offer opportunities for healing, and dreaming, through dialogue. An introduction to the project opens a display of the artists’ book and of the experimental film, On Heavy Lifting, that accompanies the book. This is followed by a conversation between poet Theresa Whitehill and the audience in which she alternates reading her poems with an invitation for audience members to read their own work or share brief stories in response to the themes and material.

This event is free and open to the public. Located on the 3rd floor of the Institute of the Arts and Sciences Building, 100 Panetta Ave.

Felicia Rice is an artist, letterpress printer, publisher, and educator. In 1977 she set Moving Parts Press in motion. With one foot firmly planted in the 19th century and the other in the 21st, she utilizes letterpress and digital technologies to produce limited edition artists books, prints, and broadsides in collaboration with visual and performing artists, writers, and philosophers. Work from the Press has been included in exhibitions from Mexico City to Japan and New York. Her books are held in collections worldwide and she has been the recipient of many awards and grants from the NEA to the French Ministry of Culture. In December 2018 Rice was featured in the award-winning PBS Craft in America series in their episode, “Visionaries.” movingpartspress.com

Theresa Whitehill is a California-born poet and letterpress artist, who has been involved throughout her career in the production of poetry events and a commitment to cultural projects that address the fundamental connection between poetics and the land. Born in Sacramento and raised in Marin County, Whitehill’s interrelated focus on literary and book arts came out of her studies with poet William Everson at UC Santa Cruz in the late 1970s and at Mills College in the Book Art program in the early 1980s. Since 1984 she has lived in Mendocino County where she is well-known to local poetry audiences. She is a former Poet Laureate of Ukiah, and a co-founder of the Watershed Poetry Mendocino festival. theresawhitehill.com