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ASL Festival: Poetry Performance by Patrick Graybill

Eye Music: A Festival of American Sign Language Poetry
Thursday, November 13, 2014 - 4:00pm
Humanities Lecture Hall - UCSC
Presented by: 
Arts Division

Patrick Graybill, actor, performer, and former professor at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, presents some of his poems and holds an interpreted Q&A with the audience. Part of the Living Writers Series at UCSC.

All festival events will be interpreted and are accessible to Deaf and non-Deaf audiences.

Humanities Lecture Hall is located at Cowell College, UCSC
free and open to the public - limited seating
parking $4 (at Cowell-Stevenson lot; additional permit parking at Merrill College)

Parking and Transit information:
Parking at UCSC is by permit only. Attendants will be on site beginning at 3:30PM at the Stevenson-Cowell parking lot and will sell permits for $4 each. If that lot fills, they will direct visitors across the road and up the steep hill to additional parking at Merrill College.
All public buses and campus shuttles
stop nearby at the Cowell/Stevenson stop (near Quarry Plaza and Bookstore) and at the Crown/Merrill stop.

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Patrick Graybill
, revered as a grandfather of ASL poetry, was born in Kansas just before World War II began. He is one of seven children; five of them, including him, were born Deaf. He has a hearing sister who is a retired sign language interpreter. In 1958, he graduated from the Kansas School for the Deaf, where an eloquent Deaf storyteller made him think seriously about becoming like her. There, he also saw his older sister in a school production of Tom Sawyer which planted in his head the desire to be an actor. He graduated from Gallaudet College with a bachelor’s degree in English in 1963 and a master’s degree in education in 1964. He took a position as an instructor at Kendall School for the Deaf for three years. He became disillusioned with his first career and decided to study to be a Roman Catholic priest at Catholic University for two years — without interpreting services. It was a struggle that motivated him to accept an invitation to be a member of the newly established National Theatre of the Deaf. There he had a wonderful decade as a professional actor and, for a few years, operated its summer school for aspiring actors. He retired in 2004 having been a performing arts and literature professor for 23 years at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf. He recently retired as permanent deacon for Emmanuel Church of the Deaf in Rochester, New York, after 32 years. He was conferred the degree, Doctor of Humane Letters, Honorius Causa, from St. Thomas University, Miami Gardens, Florida, in 2005. His avocations are acting, storytelling, creating, translating texts from English into American Sign Language, and creating original poems in ASL.

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Festival curated by Professor of Music Larry Polansky.

Made possible with support from:
Porter College Hitchcock Poetry Fund, UCSC
Division of the Arts, UCSC
Arts Dean’s Fund for Excellence, UCSC
Museum of Art and History, Santa Cruz
Office for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, UCSC
Institute for Humanities Research, UCSC
Department of Linguistics, UCSC