About Us
Our Story
We discovered each other way back in 2002, and have been making work together since 2011. Our first shared passion was food – with Diver coming from youth farms and food systems and Miré from restaurants and hospitality.
For us, food serves as an opportunity to experience pleasure, and contentment, and to consider cultural contexts both known and unknown.
Our creative relationship developed out of our desire to create outside of expected spaces, materials, and ideas. We wanted to center community, food, and poetry in our projects, and for the work to be infused with connection and moments of ritual – to make experiences that call people into relationship with each other.
That has shaped our path since.
Poetry for People anchors our collaborative works and is an incubating home for some of our individual projects. We find inspiration in personal growth, using intersectional frameworks to consider how systems work, and saying yes to collaborative practice while elevating individual artists’ talent, capacity, and vision. We spend a lot of our time together supporting each other and growing our dreams.
Diver moves with a Capricorn’s clarity, groundedness, and drive. Miré makes zip-zing connections between disparate ideas, quickly finding useful solutions and processes.
We still share a love of delicious food.
Co-Artistic Directors
Miré Regulus
A writer, performance artist, public artist, community builder, and parent, Miré works the transformative intersection through where her work is sited; through poetry and non-linear, rich, poetical prose; through community participation; and by exploring how body+movement+gesture hold what we know. She works at how we form engaged community and the unique ways we figure out how to take care of each other. She lives and works at the intersection of the BIPOC, queer, political, food-focused and artistic communities seeking to build a more equitable and embodied world.
“We all have some personal creativity – and reaching into that or just being in touch with that is a significant and valuable way to ground and connect to the people around us.”
Diver Van Avery
A Minneapolis-based queer writer and public artist, Diver seeks to infuse the poetic into the public. Diver is passionate about collaborative projects that impact people and policy in the pursuit of joy, creativity, and dismantling white supremacy. Diver received an MFA in Creative Writing from Hamline University and has a Masters in Counseling and Psychological Services. In all of Diver's creative and professional roles, Diver is passionate about racial equity, gender liberation, and creating artistic opportunities for emerging, queer, and/or artists of color to re-shape the world towards relational love. Diver is proud to be a single parent by choice and is grateful to the ancestors, descendants as well as the trees, rocks, water, animals, sky, and elements who guide the healing work.
“Poetry makes us slow down. It makes us think about the said and the un-said. Poetry helps point us all toward the nameless and word-less parts within and all around us. I love that dance between meaning and mystery that poems are able to do and love putting more poems in more places to help stir up feelings, thoughts, ideas, and the imaginal all around us."
Our Community
We are in community with a multiplicity of joyous thinkers and wise creatives. In our works, we collaborate with people with passion and specific wisdom in the project areas we focus on, and we are in long-term relationships with folks whose vision and methodology anchor how we work.
Sharon Bridgforth and Mankwe Ndosi are Poetry for People’s Advisors and often inspire how we make work. Culturally grounded creators, they remind us to ask meaningful questions, to understand how we are community, and to work playfully.
Photo credit:
Sally Nixon
Photo credit:
David Marziarz
In addition, we and our work are in conversation with:
Don’t You Feel It Too?
The practice of dancing your inner life in public. Begun in 2008, the practice is healing, art, and activism together.
The Future
Created and owned by our partner in creativity Lacey Prpić Hedtke, The Future is our home for all kinds of witchy and astrological magic.
Longfellow Community Council
develops, protects, and enhances neighborhood assets through community engagement. A significant portion of its residential properties along West River Parkway were racially covenanted, impacting who lived in those communities back then and still today.
Minneapolis
We love the creative, cultural vibe of our hometown. Artists and our practices are not siloed and separate as they are in many other artist communities. Did you know that the Twin Cities’ creative economy generates nine times more sales than the sports sector?
Parkway Theater
An old-fashioned in style, but newly-renovated movie theater, the Parkway hosts movies, music, and other events and has the capacity to allow us to gather and feel connected.
Powderhorn Park
Powderhorn Park is the beating heart of the neighborhood Diver lives in. It’s the one place where people from all of the many different communities in our neighborhood show up and mingle. We play there, make art there, exercise there, raise our children there, get political there, and practice what it means to all be in community together.
Red Eye Theater
A place for Experimentation, Collaboration, and Critical Discourse
