Helena D. Lewis, poet, actress, and playwright, visited Wilkes University on March 18 and 19 as part of the Allan Hamilton Dickson Spring Writer Series.
Lewis is best known for her award-winning one-person show, Call Me Crazy: Diary of a Mad Social Worker, in which she portrays 25 different characters, recounting her experiences in social work. She also wrote the play Shenanigans, which premiered at the DownTown Urban Arts Theater Festival in New York. Currently, Lewis is working on a new one-person show based on her experiences working with incarcerated women.
Her visit began with a stop in Dr. Larry Kuhar’s English 303 Poetry workshop course. During the session, Lewis discussed the cathartic value of performative arts, explaining how it was this very therapeutic process that led her to start writing poetry in addition to her social work.
Lewis read from her poems, which explored themes such as the impact of COVID-19, personal family trauma, and her experiences as a social worker. Later that evening, she held a reading where the audience was captivated by her dynamic performance. Lewis also revealed that she is working on a poetry collection, which will be her first published outside of a stage performance setting.
On March 19, Lewis held a workshop at 1 p.m. in Kirby Hall. During the session, she gave a PowerPoint presentation on how art can be transformative. She discussed the importance of drawing from personal experiences and their connection to creating meaningful artwork. Lewis introduced the concepts of “scriptotherapy” and “ethnography,” explaining how writers and artists can use personal experiences and human behavior to craft their work and transform those elements into art.
Lewis is the second writer to visit Wilkes University as part of the Allan Hamilton Dickson Spring Writing Series. The final guest writer, George Saunders, will visit Wilkes on April 15 at 7 p.m. for a talk at the Darte Center.
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