Climbing PoeTree is the combined force of Alixa Garcia and Naima Penniman. Over the last 11 years, Climbing PoeTree has been at the forefront of social and environmental justice movements by harnessing their art as a tool for popular education, community organizing, and personal transformation. Their award-winning performance is composed of dual-voice spoken word poetry, hip hop, and multimedia theatre that dissolves apathy with hope, exposes injustice, and helps heal our inner trauma so that we may begin to cope with the issues facing our communities.
Climbing PoeTree has independently organized 26 national and international tours bringing their performance to thousands of people across the U.S. and abroad from Mexico to the UK, South Africa to Cuba. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Alixa and Naima created the award winning multimedia theater production Hurricane Season:The Hidden Messages in Water and traveled over 11,000 miles across the U.S. on a bus converted to run on recycled vegetable oil, merging theater and activism by creating a national network that gave voice to local organizations addressing and healing the effects of unnatural disasters in their communities
Photo Credit: Pablo Aguilar