Celebrating Walt’s birthday month, this presentation will involve the origins of Paula Kimper’s love of Whitman, her journey as a composer, her work with Greg Trupiano and the Walt Whitman Project in Brooklyn, and her current project, “Melody Book for ‘Song of Myself'”, musical settings of all 52 sections of the epic poem.  Paula will present recordings of some of her favorite settings while discussing these works with WWI President Karen Karbiener.  Tune in for WWI’s first attempt at a “Sing-a-Long-Song-of-Myself”!

Paula M. Kimper, a graduate of Eastman School of Music, is a composer of opera, theater, dance, film, and song. Her first opera, PATIENCE & SARAH (Lincoln Center Festival, New York City, 1998), was commissioned and produced by American Opera Projects. The revival of the opera in 2016 at the Off-Broadway Players Theatre in NYC received subsequent productions in Chicago (Third Eye Theatre Ensemble, 2018) and NYC (Hunter College Opera Theater, 2019). THE CAPTIVATION OF EUNICE WILLIAMS (Reid Theatre, Deerfield MA, 2004) appeared at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in DC, and toured the Balkan region in 2008. TRUTH, An American Opera about Sojourner Truth (Academy of Music, Northampton MA, 2012), appeared in the New York International Fringe Festival 2013, and at Riverside Theatre inside Historic Riverside Church in 2014. Kimper was an inaugural participant in Columbia University’s Community Scholars Program. “Here is a Place” was commissioned by OPERA America for The OPERA America Songbook to commemorate the 2012 opening of the National Opera Center in NYC. ONE ART was commissioned by soprano Laure Meloy, who created the one-woman opera/cabaret based on Elizabeth Bishop’s life, and most recently performed it at the Tête à Tête Opera Festival 2019 in London, England. Kimper’s catalog can be found in the Loeb Music Library of Harvard University. Her current project, MELODY BOOK FOR SONG OF MYSELF, celebrates Walt Whitman’s bicentennial and his contribution to American poetry.

Karen Karbiener, president and founding member of the Walt Whitman Initiative, is a Whitman scholar and teaches at New York University. Winner of the Kluge Fellowship at the Library of Congress and a Fulbright recipient, she was the curator of “Whitman and the Promise of America” (South Street Seaport Museum, NY, July – December 2005), “Poet of the Body: New York’s Walt Whitman” (with Susan Tane; Grolier Club, NY, May – July 2019), and most recently, “Robust American Love: Avid Visions by Walt Whitman and John Ransom Phillips” (BlackBook Presents, Brooklyn, August – September 2019).