FREE | Every Friday: July 7 - September 29
Reception 4:30pm-5:30pm, Presentation 5pm-6pm
Join us throughout the summer for our free public series of artist talks, readings, and presentations. We’ll celebrate the series with a NEW weekly reception — arrive early and enjoy free drinks and snacks with our visiting artists-in-residence. We’ll hear from poets, scholars, visual artists, storytellers, and potters. All are welcome!
Craigardan’s Applebarn Series is made possible in part thanks to support from the Charles R. Wood Foundation.
Location: Main Campus. Look for Craigardan Event sign at the end of Main Campus driveway (two “doors” west of the farm store, towards Keene).
Gayle Burnett has been leading and facilitating courageous conversations regarding diversity, race, and equity for much of her lifetime. She founded Peace of Culture, in 2018, as an expression of her commitment to the work. Gayle is the co-author of Peace in Everyday Relationships (Hunter House Publishers, 2003) which provides information, practical tools and real-life examples to support readers in the development of conflict resolution skills within diverse environments. From 1990 to 2004, she worked with a wide array of diversity and leadership clients, including Ernst & Young, Lucent Technologies, AT&T and the NCAA, supporting increased understanding and effectiveness amongst their employees.
Gayle’s career choices have also been diverse, she began as an assistant vice president and analyst for a Wall Street clearinghouse bank, where she worked in the international markets of Singapore, Australia and London. She gained a first-hand understanding of the subtle difference between people that can create misunderstanding, conflict and poor performance. As a past partner and principal of Inter-Change Consultants (1989 – 2003) and as the Atlanta Coordinator for the National Resolving Conflict Creatively Program (1995 – 2000), she worked tirelessly towards ending violence and racism in the world. She joined the Atlanta Public Schools, in 2003, where she served in several capacities, including the Executive Director of Innovation. Gayle joined the boards of KIPP Metro Atlanta (May 2019), the Georgia Charter Schools Association (September 2019), and Wesley International Academy (June 2021) to continue her service to the children of Atlanta. Gayle Burnett holds an MA in Economics from the City College of New York, is a Fellow Alum of Harvard University’s Strategic Data Project, and a Gallup-certified Strengths Coach.
Himanee Gupta is a writer, farmer, and professor at SUNY Empire State University. Her most recent publications center on the deeply personal interstices of farming, land, settler-colonialism, historic trauma, contemporary violence, and healing. She spent three weeks at Craigardan in 2022 and is thrilled to be returning for a week in 2023. Her Gardan Journal essay “Climbing the Mountain,” which started as a riff for a Wednesday Crit session laid the groundwork for a difficult but satisfying piece she completed in 2023 for a forthcoming Bloomsbury Handbook on Women & Religion entitled “Farming as Spiritual Praxis.” Other recent publications include a forthcoming essay on “Spiritual Dimensions of Farming amid Settler Colonialism” for Political Theology and “Death and Life in the Farm World” for Simply Saratoga (which also grew out of her 2022 Craigardan residency). Himanee was her university’s 2022-23 Susan H. Turben Chair in Mentoring and is a 2023-24 SUNY Fellow for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Social Justice. She also is part of a Henry Luce Foundation-funded project through the Asian Pacific American Religions Research Initiative on fostering dialogues between scholars of Asia Pacific American religions and Native American spiritualities on food, spirituality, and land. In addition to being at Craigardan, Himanee has been fortunate to have been able to spend time at Firefly Farm as a resident with the Sundress Academy of the Arts.
Elise Jeanmaire is a queer/trans writer from Providence, Rhode Island. She was a finalist in the 2020 Ploughshares Emerging Artist Contest and the 2021 Queer-Art Mentorship Program. In 2022, she was selected as a fiction contributor at Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. At the start of 2023, an early draft of her novel, Waiting for Providence, was awarded a fellowship for the GrubStreet Novel Generator program.