Common Ground
Build Back Better: Erik Forman
Featuring Forman and Rev. Dr. Donna Schaper
to
2 p.m. Eastern / 11 a.m. Pacific
This event is produced by The Brooklyn Rail. Learn how you can donate ✨🌈
Union organizer and entrepreneur Erik Forman joins Rail Editor-at-Large Donna Schaper for a conversation. We conclude with a poetry reading by Cole Swensen.
In this talk
Please note this conversation will take place at 2pm ET.
Erik Forman
Union organizer turned teacher turned social(ist) entrepreneur Erik Forman is co-founder of The Drivers Cooperative, the first driver-owned rideshare platform cooperative in the United States, as well as People’s Choice Communications, the world’s first worker-owned ISP, launched by striking cable technicians. Before turning toward cooperative development as a strategy for system change, Erik was active in the labor movement for over 15 years, leading groundbreaking unionization campaigns in the fast food industry and conducting organizing trainings and workshops across the world.
Rev. Dr. Donna Schaper
Community builder Rev. Dr. Donna Schaper served as Senior Minister of Judson Memorial Church from 2006 to 2021. She was formerly at Coral Gables Congregational Church in Miami and before that at Yale University, and teaches leadership at the Hartford Seminary. As an elder, she is passionately concerned about leaving the next generation well-prepared for all they have to face. She has written over 35 books including Approaching End of Life: A Practical and Spiritual Guide (2015), Grace at Table: Small Spiritual Solutions to Large Material Problems, Solving Everything (2013), to her most recent book I Heart Francis: Letters to the Pope from an Unlikely Admirer (2016), among many others. She is an Editor-at-Large at the Rail.
The Rail has a tradition of ending our conversations with a poetry reading, and we’re fortunate to have Cole Swensen reading.
Cole Swensen
Cole Swensen is the author of twenty volumes of poetry, most recently And And And (Shearsman Books, 2023), which was long-listed for the Griffin Poetry Prize, and a collection of critical essays, Noise That Stays Noise. A book of hybrid poem-essays, Art in Time, was published by Nightboat in 2021. A former Guggenheim Fellow, she has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the LA Times Book Award and has been awarded the Iowa Poetry Prize, the SF State Poetry Center Book Award, and the National Poetry Series. She has also translated over twenty volumes of poetry, prose, and art criticism from French and won the 2004 PEN USA Award in Literary Translation.
❤️ 🌈 We'd like to thank the The Terra Foundation for American Art for making these daily conversations possible, and for their support of our growing archive.