Alice Lovelace was the Lead Staff Organizer for the first United States Social Forum (June 27-July 1, 2007) and is currently Associate Regional Director, Southeastern Region for the American Freinds Service Committee. Alice is co-editor at the online journal In Motion Magazine and covers issues of art and democry in her column, Art Changes.
In her work as a community organizer, she uses the arts as a tool for social change. She is a much sought after conference presenter, trainer, teacher, keynote speaker and performer. Over the course of her thrity plus years doing community organizing and community based art, Alice has worn many hats. She is a cultural worker, spoken word artists, performance artists, playwright, essayist, lecturer, teacher, producer and uses all these vehicles to organize.
The Atlanta Creative Loafing once proclaimed Alice one of Atlanta’s premiere poets. She has published her poems, plays, speeches, and essays extensively in national and international publications.
In the late seventies Alice worked shoulder to shoulder with Toni Cade Bambara to organize the Southern Collective of African American Writers (SCAWW) Alice credits Toni with training her to be an arts activist/educator/organizer/agent for positive social change.
As an artists/activist, Alice uses her words and voice to lift up the struggle for social and economic justice then connects them to a historic global movement. As an educator, she has taught poetry to thousands of students, teachers and elders as a tool of empowerment.
In 2000, Alice earned her Masters Degree in Conflict Resolution from The McGregor School of Antioch University in Yellow Spring, Ohio. Her focus was on the arts as a process of conciliation in communities living with deeply rooted conflict.
She has worked with Alternate ROOTS and Arts Extension Services at the University of Massachusetts to design and teach an Arts for Social Change curriculum for artists, arts administrators and social service organizations.
Alice is a specialist in arts infusion, an expertise gained from years as a teaching artist. Along with Dr. Lisa Delpit, she helped to found the Atlanta Partnership for Arts in Learning. Alice designed the program and implemented it in nine schools from elementary to high school level. She recruited teachers and artists, designed professional development and training and created the program guidelines.
APAL facilitated collaborations between classroom teachers and teaching artist to teach the core curriculum through the arts in innovative and challenging ways designed to engage every student from the gifted to the struggling. The program was rooted in principles of art as a tool for collaboration and an instrument for differentiated teaching.
Alice is the lead editor of the anthology CRUX: a conversation in words and images/South Africa to South USA, published by the Fulton County Arts Council and released in October of 2007 as a follow-up to her 2005 residency at Caversham Centre for Artists & Writers in Balgowan, South Africa.
Her latest collection of poetry, forever, was released in October 2008 and is available from inmotionmagazine.com
