DESTINATION // FREE SPEECH FILM FEST

Without free speech, we aren’t really free

by Lauren Earline Leonard

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EXCERPT //

When we fail to protect freedom of speech, we deprive ourselves and others of that crucial essence. Barringer’s journey to protect the voices and lives of others started in the 1950s on a dairy farm in Wayne, PA, where she was free to explore: She lived the kind of idyllic childhood that involved playing in the woods, reading books, and summer trips to museums and historical sites. She began writing poetry in high school, a habit that would inform her life.

Barringer left the farm and moved in the 1980s to Philadelphia, where she founded the American Poetry Center with Steve Berg, co-founder of the American Poetry Review, in 1983. At APC, she helped disseminate spoken word works to broad swathes of people. “Spoken word,” Barringer says, “is free speech coming off the page and out of academia and into bars and onto street corners.”

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