Maine Lit Fest Event - Day 9
Children of all ages and their families are invited to kick-off the day in Monument Square with a dynamic story hour! Local actors, artists, and community leaders will read aloud stories featuring diverse characters written by diverse authors.
Each child in attendance will receive a free book to take home.
Guest readers include Pious Ali, Shay Stewart-Bouley, and Glaisma Perez Silva.
This event is free.
Books will be sold by Longfellow Books.
Pious Ali is a dedicated public servant and an assertive and pragmatic leader with a compassionate diversified skill set in community organizing, activism and civic engagement. Pious is a Youth and Community Engagement Specialist at the University of Southern Maine’s Muskie School of Public Service’s Portland Empowered, and he has spent the better part of his career focused on community engagement. He has created a meaningful and ongoing dialogue across cultural, ethnic, socioeconomic, and faith-based barriers.
Chicago native Shay Stewart-Bouley, also known as Black Girl in Maine (or BGIM), had to learn a bit of Yankee ingenuity when she relocated to Maine in 2002. After a brief foray into education, she brought her socially-minded work from Chicago, where she worked with the homeless, to Maine by working with low-income and at-risk youth in southern Maine. She is currently the executive director of Community Change Inc., a nearly 50-year-old anti-racism organization based in Boston that organizes and educates for racial equity with a specific focus on working with white people. Shay has been blogging since 2008, frequently on matters of social justice and systemic racism, through her Black Girl In Maine website and, in 2011, she won a New England Press Association Award for her writing on race and diversity for the Portland Phoenix. Her writing also has been featured in a variety of Maine and national publications as well as several anthologies. In November 2016, she gave a TEDx talk called “Inequity, Injustice… Infection.” She is graduate of both DePaul University and Antioch University New England, and even though she works in Boston now, she is indeed still BGIM, continuing to reside in Maine.