Nadia Lexis. Creative Writing PhD Student and photographer at the University of Mississippi Nadia Alexis will discuss the intersections of her photography and poetry. Nadia is a poet and photographer born in Harlem, NYC to Haitian immigrants. Her poetry has been published in Indiana Review, MQR: Mixtape, Shenandoah, Texas Review, and others. Her photography has been published in Forgotten Lands, MQR: Mixtape, TORCH Journal, MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora, and others. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee, 2019 honorable mention poetry prize winner of Hurston/Wright College Writers Award, 2020 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters photography award nominee, and 2020 semifinalist of the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest. She is also a poetry fellow of the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop and The Watering Hole. Her photographs have been shown in several exhibitions in the U.S. and Cuba, and she was mentored by Carrie Mae Weems in an independent scholars fellowship program. She is currently at work on her first full-length hybrid manuscript of poems and photographs, while also building bodies of photographic works, and working on a young adult novel-in-verse. She is primarily a self-taught photographer who has been making photographs since 2014. In April 2019, her What Endures series was exhibited in the month-long 2019 Havana Biennial in Havana, Cuba as part of the multidisciplinary group exhibition titled The Spirit That Resides. Her work was also on view at the Motel Art Show in Oxford, MS in Fall 2019, in Detroit in the multidisciplinary group exhibition Beyond Space from 2019-2020, and in the Exploring Passages exhibition at the Photographic Center Northwest in the winter of 2020. From March 2019 to March 2021, works from her What Endures series were on view in the J.D. Williams Library of the University of Mississippi, and most recently, they are on view in the On Protest and Mourning virtual exhibition digital archive at the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI) in Harlem. https://www.nadiaalexis.com/. 

UUCO is a welcoming congregation and invite you to join us online for services this Sunday at 11:00 am.  Unfortunately, due to security concerns we are unable to publish the link to the service.  Please contact Sandra Moss at [email protected] to have the link for the service sent to you.  Please request link before Sunday.
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We will consider the history of July 4th celebrations both personal and historical and reconsider just what independence means and for whom.
 
Our theme for July is “Awakening.”
 
The path of awakening is not about becoming who you are. Rather it is about unbecoming who you are not.
Albert Schweitzer
 
The truth you believe and cling to makes you unavailable to hear anything new.
Pema Chodron
 
Becoming awake involves seeing our confusion more clearly…. Enlightenment is ego's ultimate disappointment.
Chögyam Trungpa

We are a welcoming congregation and invite you to join us for services online this Sunday.  However, due to security concerns we are unable to publish the link to the service.  Please contact Sandra Moss at [email protected] to have the link sent to you.  Please request link before Sunday.