AURORA, COLO.— In an evening designed for those in the helping professions but open to all who are interested, the Community College of Aurora will present a June 12 session titled “Resilience in Tuff Tuff Times: the Healing Power of Poems and Poem Making.”

Facilitated by California-based poet and author John Fox, the event will be held from 7 to 9:30 p.m. in the Larry Carter Theatre on the college’s CentreTech Campus, 16000 E. CentreTech Parkway in Aurora. Participation is free and open to the public.
The evening will begin with “Poems w/Healing Powers,” written and read by John Fox and CCA faculty member Wayne Gilbert. Gilbert, a former high school English teacher, has taught composition, literature, creative writing, and philosophy at CCA since 1986.

Following the reading will be a screening of a 55-minute PBS program, “Healing Words: Poetry and Medicine.” Participants then will engage in a general discussion of how and why reading and making poems offers encouragement, strength, and insight during difficult times.

“If you are just beginning to explore writing or have been writing for a long time, this event will encourage and refresh you,” Gilbert says. He adds that while the evening is aimed at teachers, therapists, hospice workers, nurses, doctors, and social workers, others wanting to find successful strategies for dealing with stresses of all kinds will find the program meaningful.

“As helpers, we are experiencing particularly difficult times in Colorado,” he explains. “Economic pressures are unbearable, and our work is more and more stressful. We are good at developing programs for those we help, but not as good at taking care of our own inner needs and health.” He says that this event will help people to use poetry and the arts for their own well-being as well as for those they help.

“Healing Words” is a documentary that tells the stories of patients whose lives have been dramatically changed as a result of Dr. John Graham-Pole and poetry therapist John Fox's incorporation of poetry into their recovery process. At a time when Americans have grown cynical about health care, this film affirms that poetry and art can build understanding and compassion between doctor and patient and help facilitate healing among the most critically ill.

Fox’s work reaches people in hospitals, colleges, universities, churches, and retreat centers. He has presented in all regions of the United States, as well as the United Kingdom, Ireland, Israel, South Korea, Kuwait and Canada. He conducts poetry groups in the San Francisco Bay Area and leads an annual retreat, The Nature of Poetry, on sacred Navajo land in Canyon de Chelly, Arizona. He teaches regularly at the collegiate and post-graduate level as an adjunct faculty member of the California Institute of Integral Studies, John F. Kennedy University, Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, the University of California, Santa Cruz and Holy Names University.

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