On July 19, 2025, Studio Theater in Exil @Hudson Valley MOCA presented Poetry of Identity. Inspired by the stories told in V.L. Cox’s artwork, Mara Mills, Artistic Director of Studio Theater in Exile @ Hudson Valley MOCA, invited poets Edward Currelley, Sarah Bracey White, and Elizabeth Burk to explore the work through poetry, drawing on stories from their own lives, the places they had known, the people who had influenced them, and the experiences that had shaped them.
Following the presentation, a talk-back gave audience members the opportunity to share their own stories, reflections, and questions.
Studio Theater in Exile @ Hudson Valley MOCA
1701 Main Street
Peekskill, NY 10566
Edward D. Currelley, poet, writer, and artist, is the author of “In Two Parts” (Hieroglyphs/Prima Facie) Selected Poetry and Short Fiction. A Pushcart Prize Nominee and his anthologized publications include but are not limited to Split This Rock, as part of their Poems of Resistance. Power & Resilience, Mom Egg Review, Hudson Valley MOCA Anthologies, Dove Tales Anthologies Writing for Peace & Colgate University Research Council, The Peace Correspondent, multiple National Beat Poetry Foundation anthologies, and Metaphor magazine. His performance piece “The Plea” was recently featured in the Studio Theater in Exile exhibit “Climbing the Walls. Board member for both the Bronx Book Fair and Poets Network & Exchange. He is a member of The American Bar Association and a volunteer legal advocate in the fields of human rights, cultural discrimination, housing rights, LGBTQ, ageism, and employment discrimination. He is listed with Poets & Writers as an American poet and author He resides in New York.
Elizabeth Burk is a psychologist, a native New Yorker who divides her time between family in New York and a home and husband in southwest Louisiana. Her debut full length poetry book, Unmoored, published in November 2024 by Texas Review Press, is arranged loosely in the form of a memoir describing life growing up in New York City, her experiences as a northerner living in Louisiana and poems on attempting to age with humor and grace. She has three previous collections: Learning to Love Louisiana, Louisiana Purchase, Duet-Poet & Photographer- a collaboration with her photographer husband. A Pushcart Prize nominee, her poems, prose pieces, and reviews have been widely published in various journals and anthologies, such as Atlanta Review, Rattle, Southern Poetry Anthology, Louisiana Literature, Arkansas Review, Passager, Pithead Chapel, Naugatuck River Review, PANK, Mom Egg Review and elsewhere.
Sarah Bracey White is a southern storyteller who uses her history and innate gifts to create poetry, essays, fiction, plays and memoirs. She is also a teacher, former librarian and motivational speaker When her memoir Primary Lessons was transformed into an immersive, dramatic musical - at Peekskill’s Paramount Theater – she was cast in the starring role of her own life. Her other published books include “The Wanderlust: A South Carolina Folk Tale”, and “Feelings Brought to Surface”. Her essays have been anthologized in Children of the Dream; Dreaming in Color, Living in Black and White; Aunties: 35 Writers Celebrate Their Other Mother; Gardening on a Deeper Level, and most recently in Mothers, Martyrs and Jezebels, a feminist anthology, and Well Said Well Read, an anniversary collection of curated essays from the Hudson Valley literary performance group WritersRead. In 2024 Arts Westchester awarded Sarah an Artist’s Award that supported her development of “Living on Stage: My Life in Drama.”
