D.A.Y. Tyme at AALCI

Beyond the presentation on poetry, the fellows were treated to a mini-concert by San Antonio group D.A.Y.Tyme. The group consists of San Antonio Poet Laureate Andrea "Vocab" Sanderson, David Jacobe, and Yvette Hardin. That is, David Andrea Yvette. 

So it's D. A. Y. Tyme. It's they time.

They sang a few different wonderful songs. Took as to church, as the folks say. 

The fellows really enjoyed the experience. 

"Today's performance was great," said Yaqkeha Witherspoon. "And it just expanded my view on the many ways there are to cultivate beauty."

And Terrie Briggs offered more: 

“Being able to witness D.A.Y. Tyme’s performance was truly inspirational and informative. It was beneficial to me as a fellow writer to listen to the members discuss their writing process and overall journey towards their current point in their individual and collective careers. It was helpful to hear the ways our processes of creation were similar as well as different because they both provided me with a sense of how I might want to adapt my process in the future.”

D. A. Y. Tyme sang an original song by Jacobe entitled "The Recovery Room." Hey, it's really powerful. One of my first orders of business after the show was signing on to Tidal to listen to the song again. (It's available on Spotify, Apple Music, etc).

"Today's performance resonated with me in telling myself to be encouraged and get through recovery," said Elizabeth Gowans. "I often find myself overwhelmed and in a depressed state. It takes quite a lot to be in recovery and I felt it was a right on-time word brought specifically for me."

Chaunece Reed noted that the group was "very welcoming, calming, and inspiring in ways they do not know." She said that she "had never experienced spoken word in collaboration with lyrical music before, and I thought that combination was fascinating and moving." 

D. A. Y. Tyme's "voices were beautiful," said Nicole Dixon, "but even more beautiful was being able to witness their passionate and strong connection with one another."

D. A. Y. Tyme with AALCI (source: Vocab's Instagram page)

[More photos from our time with D. A. Y. Tyme]

Related: 

• AALCI 2022

Vocab at AALCI

Andrea Vocab Sanderson

The Fellows had a great time today as AALCI founder Joycelyn Moody sponsored a presentation by San Antonio Poet Laureate Andrea "Vocab" Sanderson.

Vocab talked poetry, curating events, singing, collaborating with various folks, organizing social media and activism campaigns, and more.

"Meeting San Antonio Poet Laureate Andrea 'Vocab' Sanderson in such an intimate setting felt like such a privilege," said Nicole Dixon. "Being able to ask questions about becoming a poet laureate, her poetry, and her work balance was beyond helpful. Hearing and seeing her story allowed me to envision myself pursuing my dreams in a more clear way now."

Yaqkeha Witherspoon said that the "experience to be very informative, inspiring, and moving."

"One thing I particularly enjoyed," said Chaunece Reed, "was the comfortability that the speaker" had with the group. 

Related: 

• AALCI 2022

The AALCI Crew hard at work

Here's a look at our 2022 AALCI crew hard at work, taking a look at our summer reading materials. 

Related: 

• AALCI 2022

Reading materials for AALCI 2022

Here's a look at our reading materials for the summer. The books: 

• Recitatif  by Toni Morrison 

• Read Until You by Farah Jasmine Griffin

• Flyboy 2 by Greg Tate 

• Heads of the Colored People by Nafissa Thompson-Spires 

• Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic  

We also have a course packet of various readings I pulled together. 

Related: 

• AALCI 2022

Daily, enriching conversations

This year,  we nearly all of our sessions in the library. We met in a large room, but only used one table. 

We had many, extended enriching conversations. And those discussions were just the tip of the iceberg. 

I could see all the highlighted, markups that the students had on their books and in the course packet. It was clear that we could've kept going and going. 

Related: 

• AALCI 2022

Tara Schmidt's working with the fellows

I took a few snaps of Tara Schmidt working with the fellows on the puzzle activity. They were really involved -- looking at the materials and posing questions. 

Working with the different fragments gave the feel that we were literally putting the pieces together. It was an educational and enjoyable process. 

Related: 

• AALCI 2022

Tara Schmidt's puzzle activity

Tara Schmidt, Coordinator of Information Literacy & Assessment at the UTSA libraries, coordinated a really fascinating activity for our Fellows on June 9. 

She distributed handouts from a single resource on a single figure. The handouts were from an NAACP collection and focused on Claude McKay. Schmidt gave one handout to each student. One document included poems, one included an FBI file on McKay, one included two book reviews, one included correspondence, and another included additional information on McKay. 

[Related: Tara Schmidt's working with the fellows]

Each of the documents had a date on them,

The students had to converse with each other to determine the order, and once they did they discussed out loud what they had. The result was that they pieced together aspects of McKay's life and experienced based on these disparate fragments. 

The activity resembled the practice of a researcher finding various pieces or fragments on a subject and then tying them together to form a narrative.  

Beyond that exercise, Schmidt talked to the group about approaches to doing searches online. Her excitement about her field was infectious and had the Fellows and me interrupting to ask questions about how one becomes a librarian.  

Related:

• AALCI 2022