The Awesome Difficult Work of Love

The Awesome Difficult Work of Love (ADWL) is a community-created spoken word and music performance that explores identity, connection, belonging, and what it means to build a more just and compassionate world together.

Through workshops, collaboration, and performance, ADWL brings together people from diverse backgrounds to share their stories, create original work, and listen across differences. Participants and audiences are invited to engage with experiences shaped by race, sexuality, age, gender identity and expression, physical ability, socioeconomic background, and more.

By creating space for honest storytelling and artistic expression, ADWL challenges narratives that divide us and centers voices that are often overlooked. The project nurtures empathy, deepens our understanding of one another, and builds connections rooted in trust, dignity, and shared humanity.

At its heart, ADWL is an invitation to practice love as an active force for healing—one story, one song, and one community at a time.

The piece includes a sentence from the late poet, teacher and activist June Jordan:

“We need, each of us, to begin the awesome difficult work of love, loving ourselves so that we become able to love others without fear, so that we can become powerful enough to enlarge the circle of our trust and our common striving for a safe, sunny afternoon near to flowering trees and under a very blue sky.”

Adrienne with Voices of the Revolution

Adrienne Torf and Voices of the Revolution, an eclectic ensemble of feminist poets, perform collaborative works by Adrienne and her long-time collaborator, the late poet, teacher & activist June Jordan, as well as original piano compositions and poetry.

• Premiere: November, 2023, Women in the Arts Festival, Lansing, MI and Steinem Collection, Toledo Public Library
• April, 2024, Unitarian Universalist Church, Flint, MI and Urban Beat, Lansing, MI
• July, 2025, National Women’s Music Festival, Madison, WI

“This morning [after the performance by Adrienne Torf and Voices of the Revolution] ] I can yet hear the applause in my body. I can see the poetry of June Jordan in me and in every woman. It was EARTH SHIFT! …All those words in one place, on one stage with the piano of Adrienne Torf laying the substrate from which the Voices of the Revolution   bolted up like lightning, growing from  a fire field.” Semaj Brown, Poet Laureate of Flint, MI