Sara Jane Boyers Helps Residents Celebrate Poetry Month

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April is poetry month. In that spirit, Santa Monica Canyon resident Sara Jane Boyers posts a daily poem with one of her photos at the Little Free Library located in Rustic Canyon.

“It was a hit with passersby and library visitors last year,” Boyers told Circling the News, adding that she continued the posting past April last year from time to time.

Meanwhile, Knopf Books will email a Poem-A-Day during April to those who visit http://knopfdoubleday.com/knopf-poetry-signup/. “I’ve subscribed for years,” Boyers said.

“Each morning last year I would wake up and find a poem, a wonderfully diverse evocation of someone’s talent and mood, in my mailbox,” she said. “I was given a lovely challenge each a.m. to find one of my photographs that would have a conversation with the delivered poem and send it out for all to see. I am delighted to have this moment in April again!”

Boyers, like many artists, was frustrated that there was no place to show her work during the pandemic.

Not only is she a fine art photographer, but a writer and editor. Her book, “Life Doesn’t Frighten Me,” which she created for children and their families, was first published in 1993. She paired Maya Angelou’s words with the expressive work of Jean-Michel Basquiat and the book quickly crossed over to the young adult and adult market as well.

A native of Detroit, Boyers’ exhibition “Detroit: Definition” opened in the fall of 2015 at the Maison de la Photographie in Lille, France, and then in Paris at Galerie Claude Samuel during Paris Photo Week 2016. One of the photographs from that series was on exhibition in the U.S. Pavilion at Italy’s prestigious 2016 Venice Architectural Biennale and at MOCAD in Detroit.

Boyers’ “Finding Chinatown: An American Story,” culminating a decade-long project that highlighted U.S. and Canadian Chinatowns, opened to critical acclaim in 2011.

And “Go Fly a Kite: Saturdays at the Beach with Tyrus Wong” was exhibited in San Francisco and New York City. This photographic story showed how Wong spent more than 40 years in retirement creating and flying handmade kites. When he died at age 106, he was hailed as one of the most influential and celebrated Asian-American artists of the 20th century.

Boyers’ “747 Wing House” photograph was selected by the American Society of Media Photographers as one of the “Best Architectural Photographs” of the year in 2012. This photo was an architectural experiment in repurposing, using the wings of a decommissioned Boeing 747 airplane in Ventura County.

Her photos have been published in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times and the Huffington Post. You can visit her website: sarajaneboyersphoto.com.

Dr. Maya Angelou wrote this poem in 1978. The cover image is from the 25th Anniversary Edition of Sara Boyers’ “Life Doesn’t Frighten Me.”

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