Mixed Remixed Festival

Reserved VIP Seats for the Storyteller’s Prize Presentation Honoring Taye Diggs

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taye diggs banner with textHelp us celebrate honorees Taye Diggs and Shane Evans the co-creators of the wonderful children’s book Mixed Me. Get 2 VIP reserved seats to the Storyteller’s Prize Presentation and Live Event, a shout-out, a digital supporter badge, and your name in the Festival program plus a Festival t-shirt!  All of that for a $100 donation to the Mixed Remixed Festival, the only nationwide cultural arts festival in the country that celebrates stories of the mixed-race and multiracial experience.  We need you to keep the Festival going strong.  Please donate now!-Heidi Durrow

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Get reserved VIP seats to see .@tayediggs at the @mixedremixed Festival in June. Donate now!

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mixed me duo

Signed Ziggy Marley CD is Your Gift with a Donation to the Mixed Remixed Festival!

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2016-03-02 16.15.43We were so excited that Ziggy Marley has provided the Mixed Remixed Festival with 10 signed CDs for 10 lucky donors!  And not only do you get the signed Ziggy Marley CD and you’ll get a social media shout-out, a digital supporter badge, your name listed in the Festival program, a highly coveted Festival t-shirt! We need your support!  Get this great gift and help us keep the Festival going strong.-Heidi Durrow

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Mixed Remixed Festival Tshirt

Get a signed .@ziggymarley CD & a Festival tshirt w/your donation NOW!

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Donate to the Festival! Get this great multiracial family scrapbook!

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The cutest scrapbook! Yours with a donation to the festival!
The cutest scrapbook! Yours with a donation to the festival!

You can get a copy of this very special scrapbook called My Multicultural Album, the perfect family album for multiracial families, with a $15 donation. This is how the creator, Ekaterina (Katya) Dorozhkina, describes this lovely little book.

“This book is for multicultural families who want to share their unique family history with their children and celebrate what it means to be biracial/multicultural. In a scrapbook format, children, with the help of their parents, can personalize the book with their own pictures and family stories. The journey of filling out the pages of this book celebrates each child’s unique and extraordinary story and cultivates appreciation for all the cultures that have come together to write it.”

Don’t miss this great opportunity!

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Donate to the Festival & get a copy of #MyMulticulturalStory by @katyadorozh

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Get a Festival T-shirt and Support the Festival!

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Mixed Remixed Festival Tshirt

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We are so excited to debut a brand new Festival t-shirt this year.  And the only way that you can get it is by donating to our crowdfunder campaign.  Just $20 gets you this great t-shirt and our gratitude AND the satisfaction that you have done your part in keeping the Festival going strong.  The t-shirt comes in unisex and ladies’ v-neck.  Jazzy, right? Please don’t wait.  Donate now!-Heidi Durrow

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Get a Festival t-shirt & help support the cause! #multiracial #mixedrace http://ht.ly/ZaGaf

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TV & Film Star Taye Diggs and Collaborator to Receive Storyteller’s Prize at Annual Festival Celebrating Mixed-Race Stories

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 

MIXED REMIXED FESTIVAL

STORYTELLER’S PRIZE PRESENTATION HONORS:

TV & FILM STAR

TAYE DIGGS

AND AWARD-WINNING ILLUSTRATOR SHANE W. EVANS FOR

GROUND-BREAKING CHILDREN’S BOOK, MIXED ME

(Los Angeles, CA) Mixed Remixed Festival will present the annual Storyteller’s Prizes to television and film star Taye Diggs and award-winning illustrator Shane W. Evans on June 11, 2016 at 6:30pm at the Japanese American National Museum in downtown Los Angeles, 100 N. Central Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90012.

The Festival, which takes place June 10-11, celebrates stories of the Mixed racial and cultural experience and stories of multiracial Americans, the fastest growing demographic in America. A free public event, the Festival brings together film and book lovers, innovative and emerging artists, and multiracial families and individuals for workshops, readings, and film screenings.

mixed me“We are ecstatic to honor Taye Diggs and Shane W. Evans for their work creating Mixed Me!, a ground-breaking children’s book that features a mixed-race character,” says Durrow who calls herself an Afro-Viking because she is African-American and Danish.

“Growing up I didn’t have any images of families that looked like mine or any affirmation that I could claim the whole of my complicated heritage.  Diggs’ and Evans’ book Mixed Me changes that for this increasingly multiracial generation.”

The wonderful @TayeDiggs will accept a Storyteller’s Prize @mixedremixed 6/11! #multiracial #mixedrace

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The Storyteller’s Prizes are awarded each year to artists, scholars, and community leaders who have shown a dedication to celebrating and illuminating the Mixed experience. Past honorees include Comedy Central’s hit comedic duo Key & Peele, The Daily Show’s Al Madrigal, New York Times bestselling writer Jamie Ford and Cheerios.

The Festival is produced by New York Times best-selling author Heidi Durrow (The Girl Who Fell From the Sky, Algonquin Books) and a wonderful group of volunteers.

The event is free and open to the public. Honorees have confirmed their attendance for the prize presentation, which will be presented as part of the Festival’s dynamic live performance, featuring some of the best comedians, musicians, and spoken word poets.  Registration will open April 22, 2016. For more information and the complete festival schedule, visit www.mixedremixed.org.

Festival sponsors include: Japanese American National Museum, Zapier, Zevia, Total Wine, Algonquin Books, My Family Builder.

The 2016 Storyteller’s Prize recipients are:

Taye Diggs is an actor whose awards include the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series and Outstanding Actor in a Drama Series, and the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture. His performance credits include motion pictures (The Best Man Holiday, How Stella Got Her Groove Back, Chicago), stage (Rent, Wicked), and television (The Good Wife, Murder in the First, Private Practice). He lives in Los Angeles and New York with his son, Walker.

Shane W. Evans in the illustrator of numerous aware-winning books for children, including Underground, winner of the Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award, We March, a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2012, and Osceola: Memories of a Sharecropper’s Daughter, winner of the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award. He is also the illustrator of The Red Pencil by Andrea Davis Pinkney, an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work for Youth/Teens finalist. He lives with his wife and daughter in Kansas City, Missouri.

Taye Diggs and Shane W. Evans’s first book together, Chocolate Me!, was praised as “Sure to strike a chord with many young readers/listeners, and a variety of subjects, not just race,” by School Library Journal, and as “embracing a difficult topic with wide arms” by Essence magazine.

 

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An Enlightened Pizza Guy and My Multiracial Crew

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As a part of a mixed race family, I have observed that often times when we speak out about our “mixed race experiences,” we relay the negative stories. Sometimes we do so to offer support to one another or to share how we handled certain situations. Perhaps we are trying to educate, or maybe we just want to vent. I am certainly guilty of telling and retelling stories about the intrusive and ignorant comments that I have received. If you would like to read one of my many mixed family rants, please check out “So are they yours or….?”

However, today I would like to share the positive. It was a minor and insignificant experience. The young man working the cash register at the Little Caesars Pizza location in South County St. Louis had no idea how his words impacted me. Nevertheless, I walked away with a sausage pizza, spicy barbecue wings, and warm fuzzies inside of me.

As mixed race families, let’s share our good experiences, not just the bad. #mixedrace #biracial

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I will begin by explaining that many, many random people walk up to me and say, “Your girls are so cute.” Sometimes I wonder if these people really find my kids to be that stunning or perhaps they simply want a pat on the back because they think that they are so hip and socially aware to recognize that my brown-skinned children are actually my children. Of course, I prefer the “Your girls are so cute” comments over the “Are they adopted?” experiences; nevertheless, the encounters still frequently seem awkward…or forced…or just somehow weird.

DSCN9353But a few weeks ago at Little Caesars Pizza, it was different. I was with my four-year-old daughter, who is biracial but probably “looks black” to the untrained eye, and my eleven-year-old Chinese-American neighbor girl. We were picking up pizza while my older daughter and her best friend (the younger sister of the eleven-year-old neighbor girl) were having tennis lessons together. While waiting for the pizza, the cashier nonchalantly asked me, “Would your daughters like some cookies while you wait?”

I must repeat. He said:

“Would your daughters like some cookies?”

I apologize for being melodramatic, but I literally could have cried.

One time I went grocery shopping with both of my girls, ages 4 and 7, and our Chinese-American neighbor girls, ages 8 and 11. A random dude in the aisle looked at my crew and said, “Wow! How many kids do ya got?!” Do you think this guy would have said anything if I had brought four white children with me to the grocery store? I highly doubt it. Four kids is not an exorbitant amount of off-spring. They easily could have all been mine. The factor that was so mind-boggling to this man was the white woman with the two black children and the two Asian children.

IMG_0018But the Little Caesars employee saw past that. He didn’t view our trio as a white/black/asian anomaly that he needed to grapple with and resolve. He saw a mom and her daughters. Even though they were not actually both my daughters, I was so happy that he could imagine them being my daughters. “Happy” does not even appropriately describe my emotion. I was elated, overjoyed…….hopeful.

IMG_1020Thank you, Little Caesars guy, for giving me this experience. I needed it. I can look back on it, and I can be reminded that the world is slowly changing. Five days ago I remembered you at the Rollercade because a classmate roller-skated up to my daughter in the middle of the rink and said, “Is that your real mom?” As I hugged and reassured my crying daughter that this classmate was not intentionally being mean, I thought of you. I will hold onto my Little Caesars story and proudly tell it and retell it. I hope every mixed race family has a Little Caesars story.

 

by Amy Hayibor, Festival Blogger, Mother in the Mix

Follow Amy on Twitter: www.twitter.com/motherinthemix

Follow Amy on Facebook: facebook.com/motherinthemix/

Connecting across Difference: The Limits of Intellect

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How do we learn? Through observation. Education. Experience.

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What do we privilege? Reason or perception; objectivism or subjectivism?

Arguably, since the Age of Enlightenment, we’ve privileged science over stories. Can you prove it by data? By hard, steely facts? If not, you’re biased. Your words hold no weight.

Here’s what I believe to be true. Race isn’t “real.” Yes, we’re a sundry people. But we’re one human race. We think in categories, and we socialize one another. So while race isn’t real in the same way a rock seems to be, we feel its effects. Race has real implications. We experience tangible consequences.

We use race and other abstract notions to codify and to assign meaning. To create an ontology. To be able to “know” what’s “good” or “bad”; what’s “better” or “worse.” We fall back on these rules like dew onto earth. So when we can’t understand through logic, we think we understand through social “truths.”

In our desire to coalesce, we divide ourselves.

In our desire to coalesce, we divide ourselves. #mixedrace #multiracial

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Connecting. We desire connection and will achieve it through different means. We connect through shared interests…and sometimes this means sharing experiences over and against other people and groups. We’re quick to talk and slow to listen. We want to hear similar versions of our own experiences. This sharing is familiar. Comfortable. Binary.

Confusion and complexity and questions and ignorance—what a terrifying combination. We’d rather avoid new connections in the interest of maintaining old ones.

But what about challenge? The opportunity to change?

I’m mixed one way, and you’re mixed in another. I can’t hold your experiences under my skin—not like you can. And you can’t hold my experiences under your skin. It’s not fair to ask one another to feel how the other’s blood sings.

It’s beneficial to just listen. To understand, to the best of one’s ability. Some truths can’t be understood unless directly experienced. That’s real. Limitations. Also real.

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Reason and logic can’t replace empiricism. Let’s dig to connect. Here’s to connecting through difference, and understanding in the ways we can. Here’s to making room for stories. They’re as legitimate as the people telling them. —Joy Stoffers, Festival Blogger

Stories: they’re as legitimate as the people telling them. #mixedrace #multiracial

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My mixedness is queer. My queerness mixed

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MixedRemixed Anna with Megan
Anna Storti (right) with Megan

Anna Storti attended the Writing Mixed and Queer workshop that I ran, at Mixed Remixed last year. She was kind enough to share a piece that she started at the workshop as well as some photos of her and other folks at the festival.

Anna-Mixed_Remixed friends

 

“There is something so transient about the in-between. This sense of always coming always going, but never here. Because “here” for mixed folk is ambiguity, unsettling, hybridity. It’s as though the inbetween is incomplete, less than, and so painfully inauthentic. But what is this desire to be authentic? What does authenticity give us? 

Is it not also just a norm?
Queer. Mixed. My mixedness is queer. My queerness mixed. Everything is intimate. I crave authenticity so I can intimately feel complete, because what is authenticity if not just another name for real, genuine, true? I am real, genuine, true. I am all of these things, mixed up. But I am none of these things, at the same time. I am multi. My existence is that transient, almost liminal place. Never here, nor there. But both. But neither. I mix that up because that is all I know how to do. My authenticity cannot be defined by your words, by your terms. It is mine. But it is ours.
It’s all so mixed.”

Thanks for sharing your work, Anna!

Anna-writing
by Clare Ramsaran
@clareram

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