For The Public: Love Letters
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The second week of February has long been a time to celebrate love and share moments of affection. This Valentine’s Day, the Library for the Performing Arts hosts an all-woman show to highlight understandings of the holiday that are not contingent on relationships and the politics that surroundthem, but instead on the basic positivity that can be drawn from a day rooted in love. Through poetry, performance, and real-life commentary, Amy Leon, Crystal Valentine, and Bianca Arielle join For the Public to offer pieces of their own hearts, sharing thoughts on what love looks, feels, and sounds like in 2017.
Amy Leon is a musician, poet, and educator. She performs frequently all over New York and has toured numerous times across the UK performing in collaboration with the likes of the BBC, Roundhouse, Amnesty International and more. An alumna of the Nuyorican Slam Team, she fuses music and poetry through powerfully transparent performances focusing on social inequalities and celebrating love, blackness, and what it means to be woman. She is the author of two collections of poetry: the water under the bridge and Mouth Full of Concrete and just released her debut album Something Melancholy.
Born and raised in the Bronx, Crystal Valentine has been writing poetry since she was in the fourth grade. She is a senior at NYU studying Creative Writing and Adolescent Mental Health Studies. She is the current three-time Grand Slam Champion of NYU’s poetry slam team and won first place at the College Unions Poetry Slam Invitation in 2013 and 2015. She was a member of the 2014 Urban Word slam team, a finalist at the Individual World Poetry Slam festival in Washington D.C and is also the 2015 NYC Youth Poet Laureate. She has performed at renowned locations such as Lincoln Center, New Amsterdam Theatre, the Apollo Theater, and the Nuyorican’s Poet’s Café. She has also made appearances on the Melissa Harris-Perry show as well as The Brian Lehrer Show. Crystal believes in poetry’s ability to instill change in those who embrace it. As a black female poet, she believes that it is her duty to continue to share the unjust and undocumented experiences of people of color inside and outside of her community. A carrier of #blkgirlmagic and a proud author, Crystal describes herself as a lover of food, anime, people and above all, Chance the Rapper.
Bianca Arielle is a writer, singer-songwriter, and spoken word artist from Teaneck, New Jersey. She has performed across the tri-state area, using her multi-medium art to discuss the importance of love, self-care, and the power of womanhood.
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