Annette Hope Billings is a Kansas poet, playwright, actress and nurse, who re-directed her method of advocating health and wellness from nursing to healing with poetry and prose.

A poet by the name of Annette Hope Billings will be at Rainbow on Sunday to help us mark the beginning of Advent. Her hope-full poetry, which she will share during the Education hour, fits nicely with the advent candle lighting ritual. (The traditional advent wreath includes four candles with the first candle symbolizing hope, the second peace, the third joy, and the fourth love.) Why not ask a poet who has HOPE as her very name to join us?

I first learned to know Annette this past summer when she led a poetry session with Freedom School scholars.

In just a couple hours she and the scholars collaborated to write the following Freedom Bumble Bee Poem (Jesse Graber illustrated it). If you’d like an enlarged view of the printed poem, click here: rainbow-freedom-honey-bumble-bee

Here is a video of Annette reading this same poem (I love the light fading in and out through the stained glass window, and how the scholars arrive toward the end.)

You can read more about Annette, who is affectionately called “the Maya of the Midwest,” by visiting her “A Net Full of Hope” website. http://anetfullofhope.com/

You can also listen to a recording of her reading a poem about poetry here:

http://kcur.org/post/listen-annette-hope-billings-poems-loiter-and-make-demands#stream/0

Let’s give Annette our best Rainbow welcome on Sunday.