User:IandIareone/Aja Beech

Aja Beech (born May 6, 1978) is an American poet, author, and activist from Philadelphia, PA. She is known for her activist poetry on oppression, civil and social rights, with a focus on the injustice of the death penalty and capital punishment.

Aja Beech currently serves as a board member at Pennsylvanians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty.

Disability Issues

Aja Beech was born with the condition [|clubbed feet] and spent the first five years of her life living in a location of Shriners’ Hospital in Philadelphia. Beech found much comfort in theories of evolution and the idea within that theory that differences, commonly referred to as disabilities amongst people, are simply variations created to adapt to your environment. Her poem Variations, Thank you very much is a poetic account of her experience living in hospitals for disabled children and being comforted by an evolutionary perspective.

Bibliography

Beccaria, a chapbook anthology of poems and artwork contributed by murder victims’ family members, death row inmates, and exonerees to bring awareness to the atrocities of the death penalty in Pennsylvania, funded by and Art and Change Grant from the Leeway Foundation, publication in March 2011.

“For you women” and “Stealing from the machine”, these poems were selected by The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest for the Printed Matter Art Book Fair Artists and Activist exhibit at MoMA PS1, November 2010

“Life Sentences Better for Victims”, The Philadelphia Inquirer, September 12, 2010

[http://www.pa-abolitionists.org/content/07-abolitionist-june-2010 “Ms. Beech Goes To Harrisburg”, The Abolitionist, June 2010]

“Variations, thank you very much.”, The Tract House, February-April 2010

“Sand Walk”, selected by the American Philosophical Society and Network for New Music for an original contemporary classical music composition in conjunction with their Dialogues with Darwin project, February 2010

Awards and Honors

Leeway Foundation Art and Change Grantee, September 2010