Aja Beech

Aja Beech (born May 6, 1978) is an American poet, author, and activist from Philadelphia, PA. She is known for her activist poetry on oppression, civil and social rights, with a focus on the injustice of the death penalty and capital punishment. She currently serves as a board member at Pennsylvanians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty.
Disability Rights Issues
Aja Beech was born with the condition clubbed clubbed feet and spent the first five years of her life living in a location of Shriners’ Hospital in Philadelphia. Beech found much comfort in theories of evolution and her poem Variations, Thank you very much is a poetic account of her experience living in hospitals for disabled children and being comforted by an evolutionary perspective.
Bibliography
Beccaria, a chapbook anthology of poems and artwork contributed by murder victims’ family members, death row inmates, and exonerees to bring awareness to the atrocities of the death penalty in Pennsylvania, funded by and Art and Change Grant from the Leeway Foundation, publication in March 2011.
“For you women” and “Stealing from the machine”, these poems were selected by
“Sand Walk”, selected by the American Philosophical Society and Network for New Music for an original contemporary classical music composition in conjunction with their Dialogues with Darwin project, February 2010
Awards and Honors
[http://www.leeway.org/grantee-info.html?actiongranteeDetail&GranteeID757 Leeway Foundation Art and Change Grantee, September 2010]
 
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