The Helen Keller Festival is proud to host our first Keller’s Canvas event, in partnership with the TVAA. This event features a variety of speakers and guests who will join us for a night of community and learning.
Admission is free. Snacks provided.
This year, guests will hear from a variety of speakers. Both the Alabama Institute for Deaf Blind and the Alabama Department of Rehabilitative Services will be joining us. Listen as they tell you a little bit more about what their organizations stand for, as well as who they help and what they do within our community. Our special guests this year is Jeanie Thompson, a poet inspired by the life of Helen Keller. She will be reading from her book, The Myth of Water.
Members from the current cast of The Miracle Worker will be joining us as well. Attendees will have the opportunity to hear what being in the play entails, as well as ask them questions about their roles and what being in the play means to them.
The Helen Keller Festival started a scholarship this year called Kids and the Arts. We have partnered with the Tennessee Valley Art Museum to award three kids with scholarships to their summer art and acting camps. We will be presenting certificates to those recipients and learning what they did at camp.
The Tennessee Valley Museum of Art will be hosting the Helen Keller Art Exhibit, a traveling juried art show that displays artwork created by students throughout Alabama who have visual impairments, blindness, and/or deaf-blindness. Attendees will have the chance to walk through this exhibit during Keller’s Canvas.
Special Guest: Jeanie Thompson
photo by Jerry Siegel
Poet and essayist Jeanie Thompson is the author of The Myth of Water: Poems from the Life of Helen Keller, The Seasons Bear Us, White for Harvest: New and Selected Poems, Witness, and How to Enter the River. Her poetry and essays on the writing life have been published in Old Enough: Southern Women Writers and Artists on Creativity and Aging, Tributaries, Creativity and Compassion, Whatever Remembers Us, High Horse, Working the Dirt, All Out of Faith, The Best of Crazyhorse, and The Southern Poetry Anthology: Volume X: Alabama.
Her poetry and visual art collaboration “I Wake from a Dream” with retired UNA Art Faculty member Wayne Sides was on display at the Helen Keller Public Library in Tuscumbia during 2018-2019.
In 2023 Jeanie retired as Emerita Executive Director of the Alabama Writers’ Forum, and in June of that year she received the Albert B. Head Legacy Award from the Alabama State Council on the Arts for her work as a literary arts advocate and award-winning poet. This summer, Jeanie is receiving an award for encouraging writers – The Joanne Sloan National Award for Encouragement of Writers from the 2025 Southern Christian Writers Conference (Birmingham).
Jeanie has been a poetry faculty member of Spalding University’s Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing since 2002. She lives in Montgomery, Alabama. In retirement Jeanie is exploring further collaborative projects with poetry, music, and photography that draw on her poetry about Helen Keller.