LUNCHEON SPEAKERS

Friday March 28, 2008

David Roth

 Award-winning singer/songwriter/speaker David Roth returns to NUA TFI:BTA Albany from his home on Cape Cod, MA (he also presented and performed at NUA’s TFI:BTA in Minneapolis in 2006). The widely traveled recording artist appears at conferences, concert halls, retreats, and trainings throughout North America with keynote concerts and community-building workshops. 
 
David writes: "My session objective for this event?  I have always loved educators.  Educators saved my sanity at a time when I was young and vulnerable.  Over the last 20 years I've written a lot of songs both about and used in educational settings.  Think of this as a musical/spoken word “thank you” (with some creative problem-solving and different perspectives thrown in) to all of you who’ve devoted your lives to helping give people a better understanding of the world and of themselves. I’ll keep singing my “easy-listening protest songs” until the day when teachers, not athletes or movie stars, get multiyear hundred-million dollar contracts...oh...you already have one?  Would you kindly come see me after lunch?" 
 
Since emerging 20 years ago from a nationwide field of several hundred songwriters to open the Kerrville (TX) Music Festival as its New Folk winner, the Chicago native (and two-time national anthem singer for the NBA's Michael Jordan-era Bulls) has garnered accolades for his performances, workshops, writing, and recordings.  In addition to singing Earth at the 40th Anniversary of the United Nations, David's Rising in Love was performed at the 100th Anniversary of Carnegie Hall in New York City.  Manuel Garcia and Nine Gold Medals both appear in the best-selling Chicken Soup for the Soul series by Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen, and music fans may have heard David's songs in the repertoire of Peter, Paul, & Mary over the years (Noel Paul Stookey also produced If You Can't Fly for his 2002 children's album "World Around Song"). The BOSE Corporation includes Taller Than My Hair and Five Blind Men on their recent "best of new folk" compilations. David has 10 CDs on the Wind River and Stockfisch (Germany) labels, and is proud to include "We Belong Together" (co-written with 92 third-graders) on his latest recording "Practice Makes Progress."

To hear a David Roth song, click here (requires RealAudio)

For more information on David Roth, go to

www.davidrothmusic.com

Saturday March 29, 2008

Bryonn Bain

Bryonn Bain is Brooklyn’s own spoken word champion and hip hop poet. He returns to NUA’s TFI:BTA Albany after being both a luncheon speaker and presenter at NUA’s TFI:BTA Minneapolis in 2006 and NUA’s TFI:BTA Birmingham in 2007.

Interweaving social justice themes and spirituality with intricate wordplay and soaring stage presence, Bain recalls being wrongfully imprisoned by the NYPD during his second year at Harvard Law School. Bryonn sued the City of New York, was interviewed by Mike Wallace on CBS’s 60 Minutes, and wrote the Village Voice cover story, Walking While Black: The Bill of Rights for Black America, which drew the largest response in the history of the nation’s most widely-read progressive newspaper.

Described by Cornel West as “…a poet who speaks his truth with a power we desperately need to hear,” Bain has lectured and performed at over 100 colleges and universities worldwide, and shared stages with The Last Poets, Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Run DMC, and Dead Prez. For the past five years, Bain has organized workshops and performances in prisons across the country with his grassroots organization’s award-winning Lyrics on Lockdown Tour. Currently teaching courses exploring hip hop, spoken word poetry and the prison industrial complex at Columbia University, Bain also hosts BET-J’s leading talk show My Two Cents on air each week in 27 million homes
nationwide.

Crowned the Nuyorican Grand Slam Poetry Champion in 2000, Bain’s acclaimed debut album Problem Child: The Philosophy and Opinions… fuses hip hop with spoken word and the world music he grew up with as the son of African and Indian parents who immigrated from Trinidad to Brooklyn.

For more information on Bryonn Bain, go to www.bryonnbain.com

 Sunday March 30, 2008 

Lindamichellebaron

Lindamichellebaron returns to NUA’s TFI:BTA Albany after being a very well received luncheon speaker at NUA’s TFI:BTA Minneapolis in 2006. 

Dr. Lindamichellebaron is a former New York City public school teacher, earned her Master’s Degree in Reading and her Doctorate in Cross Categorical Studies from Columbia University’s Teachers College. She is currently a professor in the Teacher Education Department at York College in New York City.

She is the President and founder of Harlin Jacque Publications, a publishing and educational consulting firm established over two decades ago. As an author and poet, her books include: The Sun Is On (listed as a recommended book for New York State middle schools), Rhythm & Dues, For the Love of Life and Anthony Ant and Grady Grasshopper. The innovative Poetry & Ideas Book Series, published by Harlin Jacque Publications, is Lindamichellebaron’s written invitation to international audiences. She invites all to achieve, grow, resolve conflicts, love themselves, and love others. Her “idea” books support her creative messages and provide self-reflective “how to” activity guides for life and learning. They include writing exercises that support goal achievement strategies. Her innovative and expanding educational enrichment program, Driving the Dream: Literacy and the Arts, has been implemented in educational systems across the country. She is also co-author of The Write Direction (Modern Curriculum Press), an instructional writing textbook series published in 1999. Her poems have been featured in a number of poetry anthologies as well as on stage in the recent musical and dance production, The Groove that Got the Move of Us!

For more information on Lindamichellebaron, go www.lindamichellebaron.com