Ten Pak-IV

An Illinois Arts Council award recipient, Kim Berez co-wrote and performed in poetic dramas at the firehouse and Blue Rider Theaters. She is editor of StarWallpaper and teaches writing, currently at Clemente H.S. where her students have won many awards, including three Gwendolyn Brooks Young Poet Laureates, Youth Guidance Writing Workshop at Clemente H.S. taught by Kim Berez brings social services and arts to the neediest public schools. Workshop participants, Zorayda Ortiz and Felicia Reed graduated from Clemente with the class of 1999. Juan ?Zero? Flores and Evelyn Torres are both Juniors at Clemente. The Youth Guidance Workshop at Clemente H.S. is funded by the Chicago Department of Human Services.

Sandra Jackson is an award-winning journalist, television screenwriter, and novelist. Her first novel, The River Where Blood is Born, won the American Library Association?s Black Caucus Award for best fiction of 1997. She is Artist in Residence at the Dunca YMCA, and a faculty member of Columbia College. Sandra Jackson has been featured at the Guild Complex? annual Women Writer Conference.

Fred Lonberg-Holm?s Light Box Orchestra using light and card based cuing systems, Fred Lonberg-Holm directs an 8-10 member revolving ensemble of improvising musicians. Like Butch Morris?s conductions or John Zorn?s game pieces, the music is created through the interaction of the musicians and conductor (light box operator) who acts as a locus for the organizational flow of what is othewise entirely up-premeditated. Personel changes from performance to performance but past members of the orchestra have included Josh Abrams, Jim Baker, Harrison Bankhead, Carrie Biolo, Jeb Bishop, Michael Colligan, Guillermo Gregorio, Eric Leonadson, Bob Marsh, Ken Vandermark, Adam and Ben Vida, Mars Williams, Michael Zerang and many others.

Dr. Jesus ?Chuy? Negret, on of the foremost authorities on Mexican-American folk songs, gives an historical overview of El Mexicano from Aztlan to the present through music and art. He is the founder and director of the Mexican Cultrual Institute of Chicago, which is dedicated to the study of Mexican-American musicology, Chicano folklore and culture, educational anthropology and the social problems of Mexican-American communities. Negrete holds an honorary Ph.D. in musicology and popular culture from the University of California at Berkley.