Meet Amy Shimshon-Santo | Poet

We had the good fortune of connecting with Amy Shimshon-Santo and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Amy, why did you pursue a creative career?
Being an artist is a career, and more than a career.

Over the years, my creative careers have included performing arts (theater, dance, improvisation, capoeira), and creative writing (poetry, spoken word, creative nonfiction). As a somatic artist, I need to move around to think and create.

Poems come through me in a physical way that shifts my consciousness. Visual and emotional, I am remade in their making. They teach me, and generate space for communication about topics that are sometimes silenced or taboo. Writing poetry is reading the world with my body, accessing stories emotionally, and bringing readers or listeners together in the word to feel an idea.

On a more mundane level, the arts provided me with a chance to travel, collaborate locally and internationally, and earn income. They were a platform to cultivate myself as a creator, thinker, and teacher.

Creativity stood guard by me during every difficult transition. At one point, I even thought I should try retiring from being an artist.

I’m a retired dancer, I said.
What’s that?, a dancer colleague said, confusion on her face.
She was right. You can’t retire from being. An artist is something that I am.

Sure, I am what I keep doing, but I do it because I am smitten. I will live and die this way: a believer in the wonders of the creative process.

The creativity eventually just shifted from dance rehearsals to poetry readings and kept on flowing. I used dance to enjoy momentum, play with gravity, disrupt expectations of gendered bodies, and promote the breadth of cultures in the Americas. I now use creative writing as a healing modality, and to interrogate and speak to these times.

Moments studying or working in other areas just made me into an artist who also knows about other things: urbanism, education, policy, geography. You name it. That’s why I say that being an artist is a career, and more than a career. It is who I am, and how I prefer living.

Making art is an outlet for making change. (Scientific language alert.) Racist capitalism and patriarchal empire have fabricated ideologies of hierarchy and erasure. Any new realities we wish to dream up will need more than legislation, budgets, and economies to get things done. All change requires cultural change. There’s no way around that because culture is embedded in what people believe and how they do things.

I am a child of immigrants, born in Los Angeles. As a kid, I once drew a sketch with two cliffs facing the sea and bombs flying in the air across territories. My dad framed it and hung it on the wall. The drawing included squiggly arrows and questions about the scene. As a child, I could feel the terror and displacement around us. Something was off kilter in the world. The drawing was a girl’s rendition of imperialism.

I may have been trying to become some kind of a world citizen — an informed, and responsible expression of our species. My immediate family lives on three continents. We pray over meals in Hebrew and Yoruba. Jewish, African, and Brazilian forbearers share space on our ancestral altar. The dead are fine with that.

Culture is my medium. The task of a creative is to reimagine the past while making room inside oneself — and the social imaginary — for realities that are yet to be born.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
Readers can check out my recent book Even The Milky Way is Undocumented (Unsolicited Press), available in print or audiobook.

I am also excited about the following things coming up:
– I’ll be reading at special Mother’s Day Versos y Besos event with Metro Art (IG @metro.art.la), Las Colibri (IG @lascolibri) , and the Autry Museum (IG @la_autry).
– Check out our global poetry translation exchange with Eleuterio Exaggat (IG @exaggat), Gloria Martinez Carrera (IG @glow.carrera), facilitated by Delia Xochitl Chavez (IG @todoelresto).
– This summer readers will be able to enjoy a book I am co-editing with Genevieve Kaplan (IG @vievekaplan) and Gerlie Collado (IG @grcollado) for the Illinois Open Publishing Network that will amplify perspectives on justice-centered arts management.
– Check the new #ArtBound episode on arts education for PBS SO Cal coming out in April. It was wild to serve as consulting producer on that project that was made during the pandemic with schools shuttered. The work features amazing youth artists with @Getlitpoet and numerous BIPOC education experts. Amir Whitaker (@drknuckelhead_esq) and I wrote essays that will accompany the episode readers will be able t find through #artbound.
– Teaching is one of the ways I express servant leadership. This year I am working on a course on sustaining practices for educators with Eddie Partida for @cgutep, and I’m developing a new cultural studies course on transnational participatory research connecting Angeleno students with a global network of polilingual writers and language activists.
– Spiritually, I’ve been enjoying studying kabbalistic ideas about language with Rabbi Yonatan Perry (IG @yonasonperry), and spending time in the garden. When I walk outside I’m met by hummingbirds, and song-filled, feathered creatures which are an important energetic antidote to the violence that is stealing beloved members of our communities.

When I feel small, I listen to how birds make a noise. Their lesson is to sing your song. You don’t need to be big to make a sonic shift that carries.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
Spaces are starting to open up again, and my family and are all getting vaccinated. Over the last year I’ve spent free moments in the public parks and beaches that make California unique. For Angelenos, check out Parks & Recreation on www.lacounty.gov to find places near you to connect with nature.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
Thank you for the chance to shout out some people who are doing amazing work.

Thank you for the chance to SHOUTOUT great work!

I have to start with the creative power of my children Avila Santo (www.avilasanto.com) and Reva Santo (www.revasanto.com).

– Avila Santo (IG @omnipresencestudi0) is a musician & composer who will be performing at Afro Punk on April 23. He runs a creative business called Omnipresence.

– Reva Santo is a multimedia storyteller who just completed the short film Trust Issues and project EP screened at the Pan African Film Festival (@paffnow) in Los Angeles this year. Reva (IG @revasanto) founded and co-directs a company called Honey and Smoke (IG @_honeyandsmoke_ ) with Eilen Itzel Mena (IG @eilen.itzel.mena). H & S is a global artist and community platform.

– Multidisciplinary artist Kio Griffith (IG @kiogriffith).

– Karina Esperanza Yanez (IG @karinaesperanza) and her company Greetings From South-Central (IG @greetingsfromscla) that provides community-based arts education.

– Dancer / Nutrition Advocate / Media Storyteller Ashley Blanchard (IG @_.ash.e_)

– Artist / Curator Miyo Stevens-Gandara (IG @miyofineart).

– Zeal Press (IG @zeal.coop) creating spaces for black artists to thrive, and the brilliant Allen Kwabena Frimpong (IG @blackstarpriest).

– Superposition Gallery (IG @superpositiongallery) for artists and nomads run by Storm Ascher (IG @stormascher) .

Website: www.amyshimshon.com

Instagram: @shimshona

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amy-shimshon-santo-9248162/

Twitter: @amyshimshon

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAYy3vzoJv_Ykp5H-j2hK-A

Other: https://soundcloud.com/shimshona

Image Credits
– Main image: Daion Chesney (IG @dche) – Women & chicken: Erika Hokanson (IG @erikahokanson) “Safer at home portrait” in window: Bobby G (IG @bobgsnapshots) – Indigo blue cover of Even the Milky Way is Undocumented by Kio Griffith (IG @kiogriffith) – Reading outside with mic: Ashley Blanchard (IG @_.ashe.e_) All other artworks and images by Amy.