Arts in the Valley, Saturday (8 PM) & Sunday (2 PM), May 25 & 26, 2013, 1480 KYOS AM, Merced, CA

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Host Kim McMillon interviews Megan Segarra, a filmmaker in New York, and founder of a small women-lead production company, Meganda Films. Ms. McMillon will also interview Melissa Kelly-Ortega, a Provider Services Representative for Central California Alliance for Health about what’s happening in the Merced County community. Organic Farmer David Silveira and Rancho Piccolo Chef Julie Moreno will be on to discuss organic farming, and finally, Judy Juanita will speak about her upcoming reading on Tuesday, June 4th at the Merced Multicultural Center.

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“What can I say except that [Megan Segarra is] a brilliant writer… Each scene elegantly and simultaneously reveals who people are, what the conflict is, and moves it forward. I am excited about [her] work as a filmmaker”- Rosa Martha Villarreal

On June 1st 2013, in San Francisco CA Meganda Films LLC will be showing an extended preview of their first documentary, The F-Word.
“We understand what causes obesity, being overweight, and unhealthy lifestyles; but do we understand the psychological effects it has on us as people? The mental effects it has, and has had on shaping our generation, and the next generation. We want to document a conversation about this word.”- The F-Word.

To listen to filmmaker Megan Sagarra’s interview, click onto the link:
About Meganda Films
Meganda Films is an avenue for low-to-no budget filmmakers to receive resources and support for the development of their films. They aim to create a network for fellow filmmakers to showcase their films and to produce and support projects that redefine the role of the leading woman and challenge the standards set forth by Hollywood.

For more information on Meganda Films visit: http://www.megandafilms.com Contact:
Like Meganda Films on Facebook Meganda Films Megan Segarra
Follow Meganda Films on Twitter: @megandafilms megandafilms@gmail.com

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To listen to Melissa Kelly-Ortega’s interview, click onto the link:
Melissa Kelly-Ortega is a community organizer, who happens to live in Merced, and discusses what is happening in the Merced community in the segment Eye on the Community.

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To listen to the interview with David and Julie on organic farming, click onto the link:
Silveira Farms is a small organic farm operated by David and Michelle Silveira. The farm began in 2005 and is located in Merced California. We produce organic hay for a local organic dairy and vegetables that are direct marketed. Our chickens are raised on grass pasture that produce eggs that are superior in nutrition and taste.

David’s love for farming began on the Azores islands where he learned to farm with his father. He then returned to the U.S. and studied agriculture at Cal Poly SLO. After graduating he worked in agriculture until we started our farm. http://www.ranchopiccolo.com

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To listen to poet Judy Juanita, click onto the link:
Novelist, poet and playwright, Judy Juanita will read at the Merced Multicultural Center on Tuesday, June 4th from 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm from her debut novel, Virgin Soul, which is about the gradual radicalization of a young black woman in the black power movement of the 60s published by Viking in 2013. http://redroom.com/member/judy-juanita/bio

Arts in the Valley, Saturday, March 2 (8 PM), and Sunday, March 3 (2 PM), 2013, 1480 KYOS AM, Merced, CA

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Arts in the Valley host Kim McMillon interviews Judy Juanita, the author of Virgin Soul, about her life as a former member of the Black Panther Party, and Estella Dunn, the President of the Merced Branch of the National Council of Negro Women about their membership drive.

To listen to Judy Juanita, click onto the link:judy juanita

Judy Juanita is an unusual and provocative writer who crosses the boundaries of genre, utilizing narrative, dialogue and journalism in poetry and fiction to probe social issues. A novelist, poet and playwright, her debut novel, Virgin Soul, about a young black woman coming of age in the 60s who joins the Black Panther Party, comes out from Viking on April 22. It has been excerpted in Crab Orchard Review, November 3rd Club, Imagination and Place: an anthology, and Rooms.

Novelist Jean Thompson said of Virgin Soul: “Hard to believe it’s been almost fifty years since the formation of the Black Panthers. The novel captures that time’s particular combination of violence and possibility, and the urgency of young people who invested everything in the possibility of change, even as grand rhetoric was undercut by very human failings. Geniece is smart, wounded, hopeful, and tough. It’s a pleasure to grow with her through these pages.”

Crab Orchard Review’s Allison Joseph said that Juanita’s fiction “should be required reading for anyone studying the vicissitudes of recent American history.”

Her poetry has appeared in Obsidian II, 13th Moon, Painted Bride Quarterly, Croton Review, The Passaic Review, Lips, New Verse News, Poetry Monthly and Drumrevue 2000. Ultimately, as critic Jendi Reiter said, her “hybrid poetic form liberates Juanita to include sentences that would feel too wordy and technical in a traditional lyric poem.” Referring to Juanita’s use of controversial language, Reiter said, “Some interesting postmodern themes arise…about language that points to its own inadequacy, yet cannot be silent. It’s also about the disjunction between signifier and signified. Repeat a word often enough and it starts to sound strange, almost nonsensical.”

In drama, Juanita’s themes are social issues overlaid with absurdity, humor and pathos (in one play, a distraught nurse whose teenage son has overdosed falls head over heels in love with a duck). Her seventeenth play, “Theodicy,” about two black men who accidentally fall into the river of death, won first runner-up of 186 plays in the Eileen Heckart 2008 Senior Drama Competition at the Ohio State University.

“Counter-Terrorism” was produced at The Marsh, SF, 2008, and at the Bay Area Playwrights Festival 2004. This play about a homeless truth teller and her bourgeois counterpart began as a one-woman play, self-produced and self-directed, before becoming a two character full-length drama.

She co-wrote “Knocked Up,” a commedia dell’Arte about the morning-after pill. The play, which toured periodically from 1993-2006 with the San Francisco Mime Troupe, challenged the status quo when the men in a village, having denied a woman birth control, become pregnant and bloated.

Another play, “Heaven’s Hold,” was produced at Brava! Theatre, SF and the National Black Theater Festival in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Since 2005, five of her plays have been produced at Julia Morgan Theatre in Berkeley, under the auspices of Woman’s Will, the Bay Area’s all-female Shakespearean company.

Judy Juanita’s poetry has appeared in Obsidian II, 13th Moon, Croton Review, The Passaic Review, Lips, New Verse News, Poetry Monthly, Drumrevue 2000 and Painted Bride Quarterly.

She was awarded New Jersey Arts Council Fellowships for her poetry and an MFA in creative writing from San Francisco State University. She taught writing at Laney College in Oakland, California, from 1993-2012.
For more information about novelist Judy Juanita, please visit,
http://redroom.com/member/judy-juanita/bio

To listen to Estella Dunn, click onto the link:
estella
Estella Dunn is currently employed by the County of Merced with the Department of Mental Health for 15 years. Estella is the President of the National Council of Negro Women; Secretary for Love, Faith & Hope, Inc.; and Board member for Circles Merced. She believes her greatest achievement was the launching of the first African American Youth Conference by the NCNW.

The National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) is a non-profit organization with the mission to advance the opportunities and the quality of life for African American women, their families and communities. NCNW fulfills this mission through research, advocacy, national and community based services and programs in the United States and Africa. With its 28 national affiliate organizations and its more than 200 community based sections, NCNW has an outreach to nearly four million women, all contributing to the peaceful solutions to the problems of human welfare and rights. The national headquarters, which acts as a central source for program planning, is based in Washington, D.C., on Pennsylvania Avenue, located between the White House and the U.S. Capitol. NCNW also has two field offices.
The NCNW was founded in 1935 by Mary McLeod Bethune, child of slave parents, distinguished educator, and government consultant. Mary McLeod Bethune saw the need for harnessing the power and extending the leadership of African American women through a national organization.