About Joel

There is ancient writing on the walls of the temples in Waset (Luxor, Egypt) that states:

“Know the world in yourself.  Never look for yourself in the world, for this would be to project your illusion.” 

The drive to know the world in ‘myself’ is at the core of my life-long teaching and my life-long art (narrative memoirist, free verse poet, and documentary photographer).

i write daily.  i write docu-poetry and free verse poetry from creation (involuntarily) because of the good questions that still need asking.  i am always seeking to improve my craft so that the reader/viewer might become lost in (or joined to) what i work at: the thinking on thought, questioning well, deepening possibilities, and ‘communitying with.’

From 2020 to 2022, as my daughter turned 16 and I turned 50, i began to reinvest in my writing, art and legacy. i am organizing prior years of work and research and especially improving the level of my prose to do the important work of bringing my community, & other readers towards a world of embodiment, where we are no longer ghosts of ourselves.*

   *Nourbese Phillips notes that due to erasures of our histories, our culture, black folk:

“..become ghosts of ourselves, haunted by all that we know e know but can’t remember, as well as by what we don’t know and, simultaneously, spectral beings-duppies, zombies, or jumbies, inhabiting a world that is not truly ours-aware that somewhere out there in a parallel universe there is another world where we could become truly embodied, with embodied addresses, so to speak. When I perform Zong! [her art] the distance between these two worlds become smaller.”

info@reidren.com
(snl) reidren

teacher/writer/coach/consultant/photographer

project developer

www.reidren.com