I was longing to be a published poet ever since I wrote my first poetry piece at the tender age of 12. I remember titling the piece “the Oddball“. Back then I didn’t have the body of work that I have today. Back then Amazon didn’t exist, and I surely did not know any self-publishing platforms, did you? It was a frustrating-long winding road of how am I going to be a published author, hurdle after hurdle, and setback after setback.
November 11th, 2020 was my birthday. My spirit called to my attention and I made a declaration that my birthday gift to myself, would be to hold myself accountable to publish my first poetry book on March of 2021. I took actionable steps in January of 2021 with the grace of my dear friend Izolda Trakhtenberg, who has six self-published books on Amazon. I had the great opportunity to have Izolda on my popular podcast titled She’s All Over the Place, she shared educating tips on how writers can self-publish. Izolda shared with me the go-to self-publishing link for KDP Publishing. Adam Oliver Stokes, M. Div. holds a degree in religion from Duke University and Yale Divinity School, also a self-published author showed up for me as an artist and we had multiple social distancing Google hangout sessions to step by step get my book up and going.
Grateful for the workspace Fiverr, I was able to meet a gentleman from Pakistan who formatted my book titled “A Lover’s Fairytale”. I soon realized in January that my given hardtop of March, aligned to World Poetry Day on March 21st, 2021 which happens to be one of my parents’ anniversaries (we are Greek, they have two anniversaries, lol) so I decided this would be the day of the release! Here is the book cover!
In addition, in January, I was on my favourite new social app Clubhouse where I popped into a club called Value Culture. Value Culture? I was like this is surely me! Value Culture was created by Adam Swig. The club was very inviting and quickly I was on the stage reading my poetry. I received a lot of love and kind words from my fellow artists. C.C. Soul Kirtan beautiful soul, spirit, and singer was in the room as well and I shared that I created an event in Clubhouse for World Poetry Day. Swig and C.C. Soul Kirtan quickly manifested with me and said that they would like to support the event and Swig offered to host the event in Value Culture’s club on the day March 21st, 2021 – World Poetry Day. This was in January – leading up to the event was really empowering and I felt a lot of love and support in the community online with the peeps on Clubhouse and also Instagram. On World Poetry Day we ended up having Nicky Scorpio, Boris Vagner, Richard Vagner, Ten Thousand, Alanna Shayne, Juan Gabriel Gutierrez, Sparkie George, So So Topic, and more all came to support and hold the stage down for multiple hours!
The event went on for 12 hours total and we had over 100 poets from all across the globe come read poetry.
We had poets read in German, Mandarin, Hebrew, Spanish, Urdu, to name a few.
Richard Vagner played music to reset the vibes after 3-4 poets read. – Richard Vagner is a violinist, multi-instrumentalist, and producer intertwining classical and modern music using live looping on a 5 string electric/acoustic violin and on other instruments. His music holds a theme of electronic instrumental ambiance often featuring vocal artists. At the age of 16 he produced, created, rapped, and played several instruments on a song called “Stand” that featured artists including Nahko (of Nahko and Medicine for The People), Xiuhtezcatl, Tubby Love, Amber Lily, Donny Arcade, & others! This song was a powerful message to bring awareness for Standing Rock. Since then, Richard has traveled the world several times performing & writing songs with various artists including Soja, Nahko, Trevor Hall, Twiddle, String Cheese Incident, Beats Antique, Papadosio, and the homie 4biddenknowledge.
World Poetry Day 2021 was deeply moving and so heartfelt; It’s been only three days since the worldwide event and I am so happy to share of all the amazing poets who have been writing to me sharing how deeply grateful they are, how they are so inspired, how the room was so lovely, everyone loved hearing everyones’ poetry, stories, truths, and voice. I wish I could name off all of the poets here. I was so deeply moved by all of the responses I felt compelled to write an article here and share it with the rest of the world. Thankfully all of April is poetry month, lol so I plan to have a couple of more events for poetry month in Clubhouse in my new club The Sophisticated Psychos. I welcome you to join our club.
I created spoken word music videos for some of the poetry pieces you can listen and view them here.
ALFT Spoken Word Poetry Music Videos
Thanks for reading – keep in heart, keep inspirit = inspired 🙂
LOVE, Kyriaki Chonacas