Film by UMass Amherst’s Elizabeth Wilda to Help Raise Funds for Injured Northampton Student
Jan. 14, 2009
| Contact: | Patrick J. Callahan 413/545-0444 |
AMHERST, Mass. – The short film “In Praise of the Earth: The Poetry of Wally Swist,” by Elizabeth Wilda, a filmmaker at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, will be shown twice locally to help raise funds for Clara Gardner, a Northampton High School student who was severely injured when hit by a car in September 2008.
The two screenings are on Thursday, Feb. 5 at the Hitchcock Center for the Environment on South Pleasant Street in Amherst at 7 p.m. and on Sunday, April 26 at the Pleasant Street Theater in Northampton at 6 p.m. There is a $7 donation for the event at the Hitchcock Center and admission to the Pleasant Street Theater event is $10. There will be a question and answer session after each screening with filmmaker Wilda and Swist.
Wilda has been producing award-winning short educational films at UMass Amherst since 1999. She works for AIMS, the video group that is part of the Office of News and Information.
Swist’s poems have appeared widely in anthologies, journals and periodicals, including Rolling Stone and Yankee Magazine’s 60th Anniversary Issue. His most recent book of poetry, Mount Toby Poems, was published by Timberline Press in a limited letterpress edition in 2009. He was chosen as one of six poets from New England and New York to read their work in the 40th Anniversary Northeast Modern Language Association Convention in Boston in February 2009.
Many films that Wilda has produced, directed, wrote and edited are currently in educational distribution and broadcast on American Public Television. Her latest documentary produced in collaboration with Edward and Libby Klekowski, titled, “Model T’s to War: American Ambulances on the Western Front, 1914-1918,” about the ambulance corps in World War I. It will be released this spring.
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