Moonstone Poetry @ the Pub

Fergie’s Pub, 1214 Sansom Street
Sunday May 20, 2018, 2pm

Remembering Lili Bita

Lili Bita, of Bala Cynwyd, author, actress, and pianist, died February 12, 2018. An artist of international acclaim and a figure in Philadelphia cultural life for more than thirty years.

Born Angeliki Euterpe Bita in Zakynthos, Greece but universally known as Lili, she published the first of her twenty-one books of poetry, fiction, memoir, and translation at the age of nineteen, a work praised by the celebrated Greek author Nikos Kazantzakis for its “power and compassion.” Later admirers included Anais Nin, who said in her preface to Lili’s verse collection, Furies: “Her words are strong, body and soul in balance. Her vision is direct, unifying and complete.” Nin also noted Lili as “a full blossomed woman of beauty,” a beauty equally evident within and without to all who knew her.

Lili received degrees from the Greek Conservatory of Music and the Athens School of Drama. She also held a Master of Arts Degree in drama, summa cum laude, from the University of Miami. She taught at Villanova among several American universities, and was Artist in Residence and Cultural Affairs Coordinator at Drexel University. Lili began her stage career with leading roles from ancient drama, Shakespeare, Ibsen, O’Neill, and others. She emigrated to the United States in 1959 with her late son, Philip Rethis. In America, she toured with her one-woman shows, “The Greek Woman Through the Ages,” “Body Light,” and “Freedom or Death,” as well as adaptations from several of her books. With her husband and collaborator, Robert Zaller, she founded the Theater Cooperative in 1973, which for nearly two decades was a fixture of the Philadelphia Fringe Festival. She was for three decades the cultural affairs correspondent of the Hellenic News of America, was a longtime member of the Greek Writers Association, and in 2014 was inducted into the oldest and most prestigious literary organization in Greece, the Hellenic Authors Society, in recognition of her lifetime achievements as an author, actress, and cultural ambassador. Her local honors included a Leeway Foundation grant, a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts award for fiction, and the Amy Tritsch Needle and Gemini awards from Philadelphia Poets.

Among Lili’s score of books and half dozen plays, her love poetry, collected in Fleshfire, is best known, but she was also deeply imbued with a tragic sense of life that ran through much of her work in verse and fiction and in her two memoirs, Sister of Darkness and The Storm Rider. Notwithstanding this, she embraced life in all its dimensions.