Marieke Slovin Lewis
Seattle, Washington, USA

Marieke is a participatory artist, writer, musician, and scholar. She spent 13 years studying and performing classical piano and began composing music in 2010. While studying sustainability education in a doctoral program, she co-created a method of participatory songwriting called Story-to-Song (STS). STS has its roots in the oral folk music tradition. Through STS, a person is guided through the collaborative, creative process of shaping a story from their life into a song. Since earning her doctorate, she has been employing STS with individuals and groups, facilitating the creative process so a song may reveal itself in its own unique way, be it from a traditional spoken story, shared words or phrases, or poetry. Marieke has found STS to be powerfully positive, healing, and transformative. While living in Brussels, Belgium, she spent several years writing music with refugees and asylum seekers from their migration stories. The project, which came to be called “Migration Songs,” was shortlisted for the Amateo award for arts participation projects in Europe in October 2021. Marieke offers songwriting sessions for individuals and groups of all ages and from all walks of life.

Sarah Reader Harris
Brussels, Belgium

Marieke and Sarah Reader Harris met in January 2017 at the Fedasil Arrival Centre known as Petit-Château, which is located in Brussels, Belgium. They had the great fortune of meeting on the first day Marieke visited the center to begin volunteering there. Sarah had been volunteering at the center for over eight years, offering poetry workshops and poetry-related projects. She started a project together with CEDES www.cedes-ed.org and several organizations in Brussels to work with refugees and asylum seekers on poems that featured their stories and experiences. Together they published two issues of these poems and artworks: “Letters from Brussels” and “Portraits.”

Originally from Scotland, Sarah has been living in Belgium for the past several decades. She is a gifted writer and poet and has an incredible gift for creative expression and for drawing people into the creative process. Sarah writes children’s books, which have been translated into Dutch and French. She is an active member of the Brussels Writers Circle and last year completed an online writing course at Curtis Brown Creative. Her short stories have been shortlisted for the Asham, Ian St James, and Bridport prize and are published in Wild Cards, the 1999 Virago anthology of writing women, and Making Changes, an anthology published by Bridge House in 2008. Plums Taste Different Here, her debut adult novel, was recently highly commended in the Winchester Literary Festival competition and long-listed in the Novel category of the 2018 Yeovil Literary Prize.

Please visit her website “A Sheep Called Skye” to learn more about her children’s books.