The Bates-Manzano Fund

Co-sponsored by Grow Youngstown and Etruscan Press, the Bates-Manzano Fund supports a joint initiative between two non-profit organizations aiming to entwine international and local cultures and agricultures. By bringing together artists, visionaries, workers, and farmers from around the block and around the world, we hope to encourage the synergy of words, work, and the world.

The fund’s first mandate is to bring two important figures to partake in the burgeoning cultural, literary, and agricultural movements in Youngstown, Ohio, home of Etruscan’s founder and Executive Editor, Philip Brady; and Grow Youngstown’s founder and Director, Elsa Higby.

Roberto Manzano, one of Cuba’s most prominent poets, will be invited to come from Havana for a reading at the YSU Poetry Center to celebrate the publication of Synergos: Selected Poems, translated by Steven Reese, forthcoming in a bi-lingual edition from Etruscan in the fall of 2008.

Roberto Manzano is a teacher and critic as well as a poet. His work, which embraces an ecological and community approach to the world, has won or been nominated for most of the distinguished awards in the world of Cuban letters.

Manzano's poems go beyond the traditionally circumscribed lyric, beyond the often humble and household range of so many contemporary poems. They smack of Whitman. They outsoar anything pedestrian, even in celebrating the here and now and close-to-hand.

Albert Bates is an internationally renowned teacher of sustainable design, natural building, permaculture and restoration ecology. He is the author of many books on law, energy, history and environment, including Climate in Crisis (1990), Voices from The Farm (1998), and The Y2K Survival Guide and Cookbook (1999). Bates examines the transition from a society based on abundant cheap petroleum to one of
"compelled conservation." He regards the coming change as an opportunity to "redeem our essential interconnectedness with nature and with each other."
"Instead of wasting energy trying to fight nature,” writes Bates, “It makes more sense
to understand nature and use it to our mutual benefit. This means the end of one-size-fits-all industrial solutions and a return to decentralized, idiosyncratic plans based on local conditions."

All donations to the Bates-Manzano Fund are tax deductible.

For more information about Grow Youngstown please visit www.growyoungstown.org