Starting around age ten, Libby was part of a creative writing community that brought together young people from all over the Boston area. “That was the first time I understood that making and sharing art was a way to make sense of my experience, and feel closer to myself and everyone around me. I found the arts to be this ground that cut through perceived differences, that brought me into connection.” In this spirit Libby continued to make art into adulthood. Focused primarily in the literary arts, she’s exclusively focused in on poetry at the moment. She also co-directs the arts and creative writing youth program at the lower east side’s Sixth Street Community Center. In the past, she’s done quite a bit of collaborating with musicians and dancers, and making multi-media works. A modality she works with called “interplay” integrates movement, storytelling, voice and stillness. “Recently, I’ve been experimenting with how I can dance to my own words,” reflects Mislan. Her work is constantly evolving, but if boiled down to one concise answer, she’d say her work is about ancestral relations, alchemizing past pain, meditations on ecological destruction and political chaos as processed through the body. Creatively speaking, the biggest challenge that comes to mind is “trusting my unconscious — that I don’t need to ‘tell’ so much, or keep holding on so tight in my conscious mind to what my work is ‘about’ — that that will come through naturally. And trusting myself — that my contributions are valuable and needed in the current artistic landscape.” She also finds it challenging to be working across multiple disciplines — “even though so many other artists have refused genre, it still feels a bit lonely…” For an artist that thrives on community, it can be challenging to not feel completely at home amongst the scenes of performance art, literary art or music. As a teaching artist and community-based artist, Libby also wears a facilitator hat. “It can be a challenge to find the balance between that work, and really nurturing and making space for my own creative growth and projects — especially when they’re not necessarily what’s paying the bills.” At the moment, she’s finishing up an MFA program and giving that much more energy to how her poems land on the page. She’s also turning one of her poems into a dance/poetry video. Beyond that, she intends to continually explore this relationship between words and movement, nurture a more emergent process, listen more in the moment, experiment more boldly, and let her art be a reflection of her personal healing and evolution.
Follow her on Instagram @lunaaani