About Puppets and Poets

Puppets & Poets celebrates and explores the relationship between puppetry and poetry, two of the world’s oldest and most diversely practiced art forms. Alphabet Arts launched P&P in 2011 to create and cultivate collaborative hybrid art. This December we are proud to present our third annual P&P festival at the Obie-winning Bushwick Starr theater in NYC. We need your help to make Puppets & Poets 2013 our biggest yet!

Puppets & Poets 2013 includes:

Evening cabarets for mature audiences... Featuring eclectic hybrid performances by diverse artists from NYC, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Austin, including the debut of Annie Bacon’s The Folk Opera as a verse puppet play.

Free matinees for all ages... Through free programs and bilingual outreach efforts, we provide diverse families with access to the arts. Performances are followed by poetry-writing and puppet-making workshops.

Free afterschool workshops for Title 1 fifth graders... We are donating a month of poetry and puppetry workshops to PS 123, a Title 1 elementary school in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Fifth graders guided by our teaching artists will write poetry, and design and build puppets and sets, to create and perform their very own "puppet poems."

Free field trips for Title 1 third graders... We are also donating a field trip to the PS 123 third grade class. 100+ students will come to The Bushwick Starr for two exclusive performances of Blown Away by Poetry, an educational, interactive puppet musical. Performances will be followed by poetry workshops, and teachers will be provided with follow-up activities grounded in ELA Common Core Standards.

The artists are building and rehearsing. The fifth graders are beginning to create their puppet poems. The metaphors, paint, and hot glue are a-flowing. All we need now is you…

As a donor you’ll be in good company. We’ve already earned the support of Brooklyn Arts Council, Citizens Committee for NYC, Poets & Writers, and The Bushwick Starr for Puppets & Poets 2013. But we're not quite there yet. With your support we will:

Your donation helps support the work of over two dozen artists and arts educators, including Alphabet Arts, Brooklyn Gypsy, Urban Stages, Annie Bacon, Danya Bergy, Chris Borchardt, Daniel Broadhurst, Ren Carrillo, Jonah Eller-Isaacs, Rima Fand, Elizabeth Greenblatt, TS Hawkins, Modesto “Flako” Jimenez, Kirsten Kammermeyer, Lindsay MacNaughton, Jamie Moore, Takahiro Morooka, Jeremy Mulder, Liz Parker, raiyuki, Fernando Ruiz, Grace Rectra, Gwen Rooker, Mark Sitko, Rachel Sullivan, Carmen Torres, Renee Torres, Charles Tyson, Jr., Neelam Vaswani, Dr. Amber West, Sam T. West, Zeb West, and Kathryn Wilkening

Alphabet Arts was founded by a group of artists on a front porch in Flatbush, Brooklyn in 2009. We are a nonprofit, volunteer-run artist collective that brings together poets, puppeteers, actors, musicians, dancers and other artists to create innovative performances and programs for youth, family, and mature audiences.

We bring quality arts programs to underserved communities in locations like block parties, public library branches, and Title 1 schools. Our aim is to educate and inspire young people to become creative thinkers and doers. Through projects like Puppets & Poets we also create opportunities for diverse professional artists to collaborate and innovate by supporting the development of new work that crosses boundaries between artistic disciplines.

About the Perks