POETS AND POEMS FROM MINNEAPOLIS

On tonight’s show, we’ll be joined by artist/activists from Minneapolis to report on their lives before and in the resistance: Marian Moore, Beck Lee and Ahmed Ismail Yusuf.

Marian Moore is an activist, producer, writer and songwriter who has called Minneapolis home since 1979. For decades, she produced music: live, televised, and as a dj for community radio. In the last 20 years her primary focus has been engagement in the movement to transform consciousness about money so that it supports life, creativity and imagination. This fall, she co-edited and contributed two essays to a book about this work called Free the People to Free the Money to Free the People: An Organize the Rich Anthology which can be ordered online at Itasca Books.

Moore is also active in the movement for Indigenous land return. In 2020  in charges related to activity as a Water Protector  resisting the Line 3 Tar Sands Pipeline, she  was arrested, jailed, tried, convicted and eventually – for exercising her first amendment rights attending an Ojibwa ribbon-skirt dance ceremony -- was exonerated on appeal.

Beck Lee is a playwright and cultural advocate who relocated to Minneapolis in 2018 from his native New York --where he worked as a media consultant to the arts.  For twenty years, he had played (and continues to play) a key role in the revival of Yiddish Theater in New York for both the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene and the upstart New Yiddish Rep, which has staged groundbreaking productions in Yiddish of such masterpieces as Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Arthur Miller’s Death of A Salesman and Clifford Odets’s Awake and Sing. Lee also continues to represent the East Village Cabaret Pangea, the indigenous-feminist theater company Spiderwoman, and the NY Irish Center in Long Island City.

The year he moved, his play Subprime premiered at the Mixed Blood Theatre in Minneapolis.  In 2023, he founded the non-profit Cultural Fluency Initiative which creates cross-cultural events that promote artistic collaboration between divergent ethnic groups in Minnesota.

He is simultaneously writing Seltzer Nights, a comedy with music about a Yiddish vaudeville troupe on the Lower East Side to be produced in the Twin Cities someday soon.

Raised in a nomadic upbringing, Ahmed Ismail Yusuf is the author of three books: Gorgorkii Yimi, a collection of short stories in Somali, The Lion’s Binding Oath, a collection of short stories in English, and Somalis in Minnesota.

His short stories appeared in Bildhaan: An International Journal of Somali studies, and Mizna: An Arab-American literary magazine. His play A Crack in the Sky was produced at the History Theatre in Saint Paul;  others have been  performed at Pangea  and Mixed Blood Theatre.

Yusuf’s mental health publications appeared in Journal of Muslim Mental Health; Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology; International Society for Traumatic-Stress Studies, and Psychiatry Times. He has a BS in creative writing and psychology from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut; and an MPA (Master of Public Affairs) from the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs of the University of Minnesota.

He  works closely with Somali students in the Twin Cities, while serving on the Board of Directors of Beck Lee’s Cultural Fluency Initiative in Minneapolis

In 2025 he formed a new Somali music group, Ardaa for a  groundbreaking concert produced by CFI that blended Somali blues and black gospel music.  For this show Ahmed was able to revive music from Somalia that was popular in Mogadishu before the country's civil war which wiped out Somalia's thriving cultural scene.

Ardaa's upcoming performance for the CFI will combine Somali blues and Jewish klezmer music. The goal is to premiere this show in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood of Minneapolis which is known to locals as Little Somalia.

Hosted and Produced by Janet Coleman and David Dozer