Risa Kaparo

*JOHN LENNON SONGWRITING COMPETITION GRAND PRIZE WINNER!*
The winners of the John Lennon Songwriting Competition, Session I, were recently announced, and RISA KAPARO WON THE GRAND PRIZE in Electronic Music for her song "The Bible Before." You can only hear it here. Click the Play button at the top of the page

Risa Kaparo's debut album Dawn Begins in the Bones leads an emerging genre, which she refers to as Spoken World. It represents a deep intimate marriage of poetry and music, not unlike Shakespeare, whom we may never have heard of had he not married poetry to the most popular art form of his time, theatre.

Risa Kaparo is a poet and performance artist whose poetry and essays appear in anthologies and journals (i.e. Poetry Flash, Poetry USA; Arts, Sugar Mule, Small Times, Blue Unicorn) Her first book of poetry, Embrace, was published in 2002 by Scarlet Tanager Books. She has taught creative writing at seminars and graduate schools.

Her album is informed by her work in archetypal psychology and healing. She is also the developer of Somatic Learning (sm) - a methodology of transformative learning and change based on a synthesis of psychological, somatic and meditative disciplines, studied by practitioners and therapists around the world. She has lectured and taught at seminars and institutes in The United States, Europe and Asia such as MIT, JFK University, the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), New College, and the Dalian Medical School in China.

This practice of deeper listening is evident in her upcoming album which reintroduces poetry as alchemy and the art of the awakening. The album is a convergence of her poetry, music, performance art, consciousness studies, and an extraordinary life. Each song is a poem of witness and an exploration of life’s unfolding mysteries. The poems weave a braid of history, personal narrative, and the archetypal realm of mythology and fairytale. Her work has been spoken of as a poetry of soul-making, expressing a deep connection to the infinite, to what sustains us, and awakens our participation with all that is.