103. Liza Jessie Peterson (Playwright, Arts-Educator) – The Sleeping Giant

Think Again - a Big Think Podcast

Big Think / Panoply

Arts, Society & Culture

4.6 • 594 Ratings

🗓️ 17 June 2017

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Since 2008, Big Think has been sharing big ideas from creative and curious minds. Since 2015, the Think Again podcast has been taking us out of our comfort zone, surprising our guests and Jason Gots, your host, with unexpected conversation starters from Big Think’s interview archives. Liza Jessie Peterson is an actress, poet, playwright, and arts-educator who’s been working with adolescent boys and girls incarcerated on Rikers Island for the past 18 years. Her fierce, funny, powerfully written new book is All Day: A Year of Love and Survival Teaching Incarcerated Kids At Rikers Island. The loving and specific portraits she paints of her students highlight the cruelty of the systems (economic, school, police, prison) that fail so many young black men, landing them and keeping them in prison. In this episode we talk about cultural icons and the realities behind them, hip-hop, the trauma of poverty and the tragedy of the American prison system, and how to make impossible situations better. Surprise conversation starter interview clips in this episode: Marie Gottschalk on solitary confinement Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey there, I'm Jason Gots, and you're listening to Think Again, a Big Think podcast.
0:10.0	Started in 2008, Big Think is a kind of online think tank of big ideas from some of the most
0:15.5	creative thinkers on the planet. On the podcast, we revisit these ideas in new and different ways.
0:22.6	Our producers surprised me and my guests, with short interview clips from Big Things Archives,
0:25.6	ideas that we didn't necessarily come here expecting to discuss.
0:28.6	I'm very happy to be here today with Lisa Jesse Peterson.
0:31.6	She's an actress, poet, playwright, and arts educator
0:35.6	who's been working with adolescent boys and girls incarcerated
0:38.7	on Rikers Island for the past 18 years.
0:42.2	Her fierce, funny, powerfully written new book is all day, a year of love and survival teaching
0:47.4	incarcerated kids at Rikers Island.
0:49.7	The loving and specific portraits she paints of her students highlight the cruelty of the
0:54.1	systems,
0:55.0	economic, school, police, prison that fail so many young black men landing them and keeping them
1:01.5	in prison.
1:02.5	Welcome to think again, Lisa.
1:04.0	Thank you.
1:05.0	I guess I want to start with an overview.
1:07.0	Like this is, I mean, you've been working for many years with incarcerated youth but
1:11.9	this wasn't exactly the first year but it's a while ago that this book takes
1:16.2	place like how far back are we going so the book well the the timeline for this
1:22.3	specific portion of my journey was from 2008 to 2009 right I originally started working at Rikers Island in
	...

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