November 12–14, 2026
Kent State University
Poets for Science
Gathering
The Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University invites all who share in the alliance of poetry and science to a major, multi-day gathering in Kent, Ohio.
Session proposals now closed.
About the
Gathering
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Explore science and the imaginative life.
The gathering welcomes writers, scientists, researchers, educators, students, clinicians, policy makers, community organizers, and members of the public who are curious about the meeting ground between science and the imaginative life for three days of readings and panels, participatory events, formal and informal conversations, and a book fair.
Engage with speakers opening cross-disciplinary pathways.
Featured poets and scientists will include Poets for Science founder Jane Hirshfield, Arthur Sze, Tracy K. Smith, Camille Dungy, Kimberly Blaeser, Melissa Nelson, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Phillip Levin, Jane Lubchenco, and Brandon Kilbourne.
Gather around readings, a bookfair, meals, and more.
A varied program of public readings and facilitated sessions will be led by practitioners working at the intersection of poetry and science. The gathering will also include an open mic reading, a book fair, and time for conversation and collaboration.
Envision the next 10 years with us.
This first-ever Poets for Science Gathering celebrates nearly a decade of public work linking poetry with scientific inquiry and will offer participants an opportunity to forge new friendships and networks of connection in the shared work of experimentation, exploration, discovery, and expression.
Featured Poets &
Scientists
Jane Hirshfield
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Jane Hirshfield, among American poetry’s foremost spokespersons for the biosphere, founded Poets For Science in 2017, in tandem with the Wick Poetry Center. She is the author of ten much-honored books of poetry, most recently The Asking: New and Selected Poems (Knopf, 2023), two now-classic essay collections, and four books collecting world poets from the deep past. Her work has been translated into seventeen languages and appears regularly in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, The Best American Poems anthology, and elsewhere. A former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and spring 2026 Visiting Fellow of the Harvard Divinity School, Hirshfield was elected in 2019 into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
Photo by Curt Richter
Tracy K. Smith
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Tracy K. Smith is a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, memoirist, editor, translator and librettist. She served as the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States from 2017-19, during which time she spearheaded American Conversations: Celebrating Poetry in Rural Communities with the Library of Congress, created the American Public Media podcast The Slowdown, and edited the anthology American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time. Smith is the author of five poetry collections: Such Color: New and Selected Poems, which won the 2022 New England Book Award; Wade in the Water, which was awarded the 2018 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award; Life on Mars, which won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize; Duende, winner of the 2006 James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets; and The Body’s Question, which received the 2003 Cave Canem Prize. Her memoir, Ordinary Light, was a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award in nonfiction. She is the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University, and a Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at Harvard Radcliffe Institute.
Arthur Sze
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Arthur Sze is a poet, translator, and editor, and in 2025 he was named the 25th Poet Laureate of the United States. He is the author of twelve books of poetry, including Into the Hush (2025) and The White Orchard: Selected Interviews, Essays, and Poems (2025); The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems (2021); Sight Lines (2019), for which he won the National Book Award; Compass Rose (2014); The Ginkgo Light (2009); Quipu (2005); The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970–1998 (1998); and Archipelago (1995). He also authored Transient Worlds: On Translating Poetry (forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press, 2026), The Silk Dragon II: Translations of Chinese Poetry (2024), and edited Chinese Writers on Writing (2010).
Camille T. Dungy
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Camille T. Dungy is the author of Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden. Dungy has also written five collections of poetry, including America, A Love Story, Trophic Cascade, winner of the Colorado Book Award, and the essay collection Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She edited Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, the first anthology to bring African American environmental poetry to national attention. A University Distinguished Professor at Colorado State University, Dungy’s honors include the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Book Award, an Honorary Doctorate from SUNY ESF, and fellowships from the NEA in both prose and poetry.
Maria Popova
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Maria Popova thinks and writes about our search for meaning—sometimes through science and philosophy, sometimes through poetry and children’s books, always through the lens of wonder. She is the creator of The Marginalian, born in 2006 under the outgrown name Brain Pickings and included in the Library of Congress permanent digital archive of culturally valuable materials, author of Figuring and The Snail with the Right Heart, and maker of The Universe in Verse—a charitable celebration of the wonder of reality through stories of science winged with poetry.
Diane Ackerman
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Poet and essayist, Diane Ackerman writes about the natural world—its textures, creatures, hidden lives and longings. She is the author of over two dozen books of poetry and prose, including the New York Times bestsellers The Human Age, The Zookeeper’s Wife, and A Natural History of the Senses. She is a recipient of the Stephen Hawking Medal for Communicating Science and the Orion Book Award, among others. As a great fan of both mind and matter, she feels most at home where science and poetry meet, in a commonwealth of wonder.
Kimberly Blaeser
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Kimberly Blaeser, founding director of Indigenous Nations Poets and past Wisconsin Poet Laureate, is a multi-genre author. Her six poetry collections include Ancient Light and Résister en dansant/Ikwe-niimi: Dancing Resistance.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
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Alison Hawthorne Deming is author of six poetry collections and five nonfiction books. A Guggenheim Fellow, she published in 2025 the poetry collection Blue Flax & Yellow Mustard Flower and the anthology The Gift of Animals: Poems of Love, Loss, & Connection. She is Regents Professor Emerita at the University of Arizona.
Phillip Levin
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Phillip Levin is a professor at the University of Washington and Interim Executive Director of UW’s EarthLab. He directs The Nature Record, a national initiative exploring how nature supports communities. His work centers on conservation, sustainability, and connecting science with policy to shape a more just and thriving future.
Jane Lubchenco
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Jane Lubchenco, Wayne and Gladys Valley Professor of Marine Biology and University Distinguished Professor at Oregon State University, is a marine ecologist with expertise in the ocean, climate change, and interactions between the environment and human well-being. She served as the U.S. Under Secretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere and Administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and an inaugural member of President Barack Obama’s Science Team from 2009-2013. From 2014-2016, she was the first U.S. State Department Science Envoy for the Ocean, serving as a science diplomat to China, Indonesia, South Africa, Mauritius and the Seychelles. From 2021-2025 she led the Climate and Environment Team at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, leading science-based policies on nature, climate change, Indigenous Knowledge, the ocean, polar regions, and environmental health.
Melissa K. Nelson
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Melissa K. Nelson is a cultural ecologist and indigenous scholar-activist. She was associate professor of American Indian Studies at San Francisco State University and executive director of The Cultural Conservancy, an indigenous rights organization. Nelson is Anishinaabe/Métis/Norwegian and an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa Tribe.
Brandon Kilbourne
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Brandon Kilbourne is a poet and research biologist living in Berlin, Germany. A Cave Canem Fellow, his debut collection Natural History (Graywolf Press, 2025) was winner of the 2025 Cave Canem Prize and went on to be selected by Smithsonian Magazine as one of the ten best science books of 2025, in addition to being a finalist for the 2026 PEN Open Book Award. In 2024, he was Artist-in-Residence at the School of Veterinary Medicine at Louisiana State University, where he explored parallels between poetry and science. Having earned his Ph.D. in evolutionary biology from the University of Chicago, he has worked in natural history museums for over two decades. His scientific work on the evolution and locomotion of mammals, non-avian dinosaurs, and birds has been funded by the National Science Foundation and German Research Foundation, with his publications appearing in Science Advances and Evolution, among other journals. You can read more about his work at brandonkilbournepoetry.com.
Natalie Batalha
Bio
Natalie Batalha is professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz. She is an eminent planetary astronomer who served as the scientific lead for NASA’s Kepler mission. In 2017, Time magazine named her among the 100 most influential people in the world. Her research focuses on exploring the diversity of planets in our galaxy, investigating questions of planetary habitability and searching for evidence of life beyond the solar system.
Gathering
Sessions
Preview the sessions for the 2026 Poets for Science Gathering. The schedule for sessions will be available in October.
Schedule
Overview
Thursday, November 12
5:00pm: Gathering Check-in
6:30pm: Food & Refreshments
7:00pm: Evening Program
Friday, November 13
9:00am–11:15am: Morning Sessions
11:30am: Lunch
1:00pm: Afternoon Program
3:00pm–5:15pm: Afternoon Sessions
5:30pm: Dinner
7:00pm: Evening Program
9:00pm–11:00pm: Open Mic
Saturday, November 14
9:00am–11:15am: Morning Sessions
11:30am: Lunch
1:00pm: Afternoon Program
2:30-5:00pm: Book Fair
5:30pm: Dinner
7:00pm: Evening Program
Register Now
$275 Registration with meals
$200 Registration without meals
$150 Student registration with meals
Registration grants access to all events, interactive sessions, and the afternoon and evening programs. A registration ticket with meals will give you access to lunch and dinner on Friday and Saturday.
Registration Notes
If cost is a barrier to your participation, we offer a limited number of reduced registration options based on financial need and available on a first-come, first-served basis. Please email wickpoetry@kent.edu for more information.
If you plan on submitting a panel proposal, please wait to register until you receive a decision as to whether your panel is accepted. If accepted, all panel participants will receive a fully waived registration and will be provided with a link to register
Registration Now Open
Submissions Closed
Call for Proposals: Now Closed
We invited poets, scientists, educators, and interdisciplinary practitioners to submit proposals for one-hour breakout sessions in a range of formats—readings, panels, presentations, and generative workshops.
After a tremendous outpouring of wonderful proposals, which we reviewed and accepted on a rolling basis, submissions are now closed. We look forward to seeing you in November!
Where to Stay
Choose from the area hotels below offering special rates for the gathering.
Program Partners
Terrain.org, The Nature Record, Kent Displays, Kent State University’s College of Science and Humanities, Libraries, Office of Sustainability, Environmental Science and Design Research Institute, Brain Health Research Institute, and Department of Physics
Generously Supported by
