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LISTEN: José Faus Responds To School Shootings With Poetry

Laura Spencer
/
KCUR

 Artist José Faus, a native of Bogota, Colombia, is widely known for his colorful community murals in the Kansas City area, but he's also a poet, writer and playwright, and a founding member of the Latino Writers Collective.

In 2012, after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, Faus wanted to find a way to "talk about what happened there." During a writing workshop at an elementary school, he was inspired by children's nursery rhymes.  

"I'm a visual artist as well, so the idea of assemblage, of taking disparate elements and putting them together to create something new immediately came to me," says Faus. "And this is what I came up with."

All of our WORD readings, including bonus tracks by some poets, are archived on SoundCloud

Laura Spencer is staff writer/editor at the Kansas City Public Library and a former arts reporter at KCUR.
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