Poems for Peace is a Subud event started by Latifah Taormina which is being organized as a Zoom event by Andrew Hall of Ottawa, Canada. It coincides annually with the U.N. International Day of Peace on September 21. This year’s event happens on Tuesday, September 21 at 10am PDT/1pm EDT/6pm in London. Andrew shares this event background provided by Latifah:

The first year we did Poems for Peace, in 2012, in addition to the public event in Austin, we offered a $500.00 prize — to the general public and the global Subud public — for an outstanding Poem for Peace. I arranged for Cyrus Cassells, a friend, an award-winning poet himself, and a professor of poetry at nearby Texas State University at San Marcos, to judge the entrants.

You can check out Cyrus on Wikipedia or here: https://poets.org/poet/cyrus-cassells

Cyrus helped us craft the guidelines for entrants, and how we would give them to him — hiding the entrants’ names — to judge. A non-Subud member won first prize, but the runner-up was Devreaux Baker who has gone on to do quite well as a poet of some stature.

More about her here: https://www.macdowell.org/artists/devreaux-baker

She lived up in Mendocino then. I don’t know if she’s still active in Subud.  Her prize-winning poem is on our poems-for-peace.org website.

If you’d like to make a presentation os part of the September 21 event, please review this video:

This came together at the last minute, but we are interested in poetry, song, dance, chant, film and other short peace presentations.