Submitted by Orcas Center.

In conjunction with Imagine Arts and Music Festival, Orcas Center will present Climbing PoeTree on Wednesday, Sept. 11 at 7:30 p.m. on Center Stage. Tickets range from $15-$47 and are available online at http://www.orcascenter.org/.

Climbing PoeTree is the combined force of award-winning performance artists, Alixa Garcia and Naima Penniman who have sharpened their art as a tool for popular education, community organizing, and personal transformation. Interweaving spoken word, hip hop and award-winning multimedia theater, the duo uses their platform to expose injustice and channel hope into vision. With flawless cadence and impeccable lyricism, Garcia and Penniman weave together their voices to tell powerful stories of love and liberation, state and personal violence, social, environmental, racial, and sexual justice, woman’s empowerment, and human transcendence.

Climbing PoeTree has stirred crowds at diverse venues from the United Nations to Harvard University and at many festivals including Lightning In a Bottle, Many Rivers to Cross, and Symbiosis to the world-renowned TED: Ideas Worth Spreading. They have been featured alongside powerhouses such as Alicia Keys, Alice Walker, Janelle Monáe, Erykah Badu, Maxwell, Cornel West, Madonna and Angela Davis, who writes: “Each time I have the pleasure of attending a performance by Climbing PoeTree, I feel enriched, renewed, and inspired. Alixa and Naima insist that poetry can change the world—and it is true that the urgency, power and beauty of their words impel us to keep striving for the radical futures toward which they gesture.”