Making Home: A Reading
Sunday, Oct 4, 4- 5:30 p.m
Elsa’s House of Sleep | 1441 University Ave West
The idea for the Midway Music and Arts Fest came from a group of strangers gathering together around two powerful ideas: first, they were neighbors; and second, they believed that neighbors stand up for neighbors. Neighborhoods and communities are not neutral concepts. The complicated dance of immigration, settlement, displacement, and accommodation shapes the home that we make here together. Readings from writers Patti Kameya, Hawona Sullivan Janzen, Carrie Pomeroy, Alison Morse, and Savannah Dotson explore who gets to call a place home, whose stories are told, and how communities respond when their neighbors are threatened.
Learn more about Elsa’s House of Sleep at elsasfurniture.com
Carrie Pomeroy
Longtime Midway resident Carrie Pomeroy has published short stories and essays in The Saint Paul Almanac, Literary Mama, CALYX, The Laurel Review, The Twin Cities Daily Planet, and the anthology Riding Shotgun: Women Write About Their Mothers. Her writing has won a Minnesota State Arts Board grant and an honorable mention for the Pushcart Prize. After a childhood and young adulthood spent moving often, she has been so happy and grateful to have found home and community in the Midway.
Patti Kameya
Patti Kameya is a descendant of Okinawan and Japanese sugar plantation workers in Hawaiʻi. She now writes, edits, forages wild plants, and treats historical amnesia in the Dakota homeland of Saint Paul, Minnesota. Her writing appears in North Dakota Quarterly (2022), This Was 2020 by the Minnesota Libraries Publishing Project (2021), and elsewhere. She was a 2019–2020 Loft Mentor Series fellow and received several Minnesota State Arts Board grants to research and write about a Japanese American family who moved to Minneapolis in 1919. As a teaching artist, she taught “Your Story and Historical Context” at the Loft Literary Center in 2018, 2022, and 2025. She occasionally performs comedy for the Funny Asian Women Kollective. Find her work at pattikameya.com.
Hawona Sullivan Janzen
Hawona Sullivan Janzen is a poet, artist, and arts administrator who believes art is the only thing that can save us from ourselves. Based in St. Paul, Minnesota, Hawona has been part of the Dale Street Bridge Project and the John Biggers Seed Project – two government-supported public art efforts that sought to rectify past wrongs against historically African American communities in Minnesota. Her arts administration work on #ReVisionRice, a five-year effort to artfully engage with residents of the North End Neighborhood of Saint Paul, has won numerous local and national awards.
Her poetry has been read on National Public Radio, featured in 10-foot-tall broadsides for the “Poetry of Resistance and Change Project,” and performed as a jazz opera. Her recent works include: “Love Letters for the Midway,” a crowdsourced 100-line love poem for the Hamline-Midway Community printed onto lawn signs and hosted in neighborhood front yards and storefront windows of the Midway; the “Rondo Family Reunion,” a photography and poetry project soon to be published as a book; and “Freeway Stories,” a play about the impact of I-94 on life in the Rondo Community of St. Paul, written for Mixed Blood Theater and performed outside in the shadow of I-94.
Savannah Dotson
Savannah is a well-rounded creative. When she's not writing, she's knitting, crocheting, baking, stitching, gardening, performing, or spending time with friends and family. She lives in the Midway with her daughter and pets (3 cats and a dog) and is an alumna of Hamline University ('14).
Alison Morse
Alison Morse is the author of two chapbooks, If You Raise a Chicken Over Your Head (Red Bird Chapbooks), a flash fiction collection about Jews attempting to live out goodness with mixed results, and The Price of Our Clothes (Perlman Museum), poems that animate personal and political ties between two garment industry accidents: the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in NYC in 1991 and the 2013 Rana Plaza collapse in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Her poems, short stories, and articles have been published widely in magazines, literary journals, and anthologies. Alison lives in Minneapolis, where she teaches creative workshops related to the labor behind the clothes we wear, and mentors poetry, fiction and memoir writers through the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. She is the proud descendant of immigrants to the U.S., many of whom were garment workers. Alison would like to thank the people of Midway for being such good neighbors.