Three poets, one an evolutionary biologist, the others inspired by geology and biology, will share an exemplary poetic-scientific poem, share a poem of their own, and discuss the following: Do science and poetry have distinct strengths? Are these strengths complementary, and how can science-poets employ both strengths? What does a poetic approach to science by a scientist consist of, compared to that of a non-scientist poet? What might scientists be skeptical of in literary-poetic approaches to scientific material? How can poets—who engage in imaginative leaps, perspective work, and other literary adventures—be careful when creating poems about such things?

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Evolutionary biologist and poet Brandon Kilbourne is a Cave Canem Fellow and winner of the 2025 Cave Canem prize; his first book of poems, Natural History (Graywolf Press, 2025), was named one of Smithsonian Magazine’s Ten Best Science Books of 2025 in addition to being a finalist for the 2026 PEN Open Book Award. His scientific and poetic works have appeared in Evolution, Science Advances, and in Ecotone, Poet Lore,terrain.org, Sea to Sky Journal, The Common, and many other publications. In 2024-25 he was artist-in-residence in the School of Veterinary Medicine at Louisiana State University. He was born in Lafayette, Louisiana and is currently living in Berlin.

Poet Julia Johnson was born in New Orleans, Louisiana and is the author of the books Subsidence, The Falling Horse, and Naming the Afternoon. Her poems appear in the new anthology Diving Into Nature: An Eco-Poetry Anthology of Louisiana, as well as in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, Smartish Pace, Poetry International, and many other journals and anthologies. Julia has taught at Hollins University, The Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi, and UNC Greensboro. She teaches at the University of Kentucky, where she founded the MFA program in Creative Writing.

Lisa Williams is the author of the books Gazelle in the House, Woman Reading to the Sea, and The Hammered Dulcimer. Her poems are featured in Ecotone, onterrain.org, and in New England Review, as well as in Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems about Birds (selected by Billy Collins), the forthcoming Casting Lines: An Anthology of Fish Poems by Female Poets (forthcoming 2027), and The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks. Born in Nashville, Tennessee, Lisa lives in Kentucky, teaches at Centre College, and serves as Series Editor for the University Press of Kentucky New Poetry and Prose Series.

This session is a dialog in poetry and science, focusing on poems oriented toward—and even addressing—animals and environments. Catherine Pierce will read some of her poems in this vein, selected by both participants. After each poem, Ryan Hediger will discuss some of the science and history related to Catherine’s figures, frames, and poetic approaches. Catherine will then respond to Ryan’s remarks before repeating the procedure with another poem. Key themes include the wildness of poetic understanding, human kinship with animals, observing animals in natural environments, and interpreting human experiences through animal frames and figures.

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Catherine Pierce’s fifth book of poetry, Dear Beast, is newly out from Saturnalia Books. Her memoir-in-essays, Foxes for Everybody, was published in January 2026. She is the author of Danger Days (2020), The Tornado Is the World (2016), The Girls of Peculiar (2012), and Famous Last Words (2008). Her poems have been published widely, including in The Best American Poetry, Poetry Magazine, and the 2019 and 2021 Pushcart Prize anthologies. She and her family live in Delaware, where she runs Studio & Craft, a poetry community, and continues to write, teach, and spend as much time outside as possible. Website:https://www.catherinepiercepoet.com/.

Ryan Hediger is a professor and the Undergraduate Studies Coordinator of English at Kent State University. He specializes in the environmental humanities, animal studies, and U.S. literature. He has published widely in these areas and is the author of Homesickness: Of Trauma and the Longing for Place in a Changing Environment, editor of two essay collections on animals, and editor of Planet Work: Rethinking Labor and Leisure in the Anthropocene (2023) and Hemingway and Posthumanism (2025). He lives with his family on an old farm in Hudson, Ohio.

Addressing poets from Shakespeare, Fletcher and Spenser to Nezhukumatathil, Santos Perez and Todd Davis, panelists will discuss techniques such as erasure, translation, revisions, and wild reimaginings, across a range of inquiries, including the pastoral, human/nonhuman relationship, deforestation, environment of culture and belonging, and unfolding revelations of the human brain.

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Kate Caraballo is a poet and fiction writer living in Youngstown, Ohio. Her work has been published by Agora, The Carroll Review, Poetic Sun, The Words Faire, and Boudin. Kate is a full time mom, an adjunct professor at YSU, and a part-time freelance editor for emerging poets and fiction writers. She serves on the board of Lit Youngstown, edits and reads chapbooks for Chestnut Review, and is working to complete her own chapbook on young motherhood and postpartum experience. Visithttps://katecaraballo.wixsite.com/caraballoportfolio to read more of her published and upcoming work.

Ellen Kombiyil (she/her) is the author of My Prayer a Slit Throat (winner of the New Constructions Hybrid Book Prize, forthcoming Wet Cement Press 2026), Diagnostic on the Plumbing and Wiring of Females (Visual Poetry Series Award, forthcoming Anhinga Press 2026), and Love as Invasive Species (Cornerstone 2024). She is a 2022 and 2025 recipient of a BRIO Award from the Bronx Council on the Arts, a 2025 winner of the Geri Digiorno Multi-Genre Prize, and 2025 winner of the Tupelo Quarterly Prize for Cross-Disciplinary Writing. She is an adjunct assistant professor at Hunter College in New York City.

Karen Schubert is author of The Compost Reader (Accents Publishing) and five chapbooks including I Left My Wings on a Chair, a Wick Poetry Center winner (Kent State Press). Her poems, fiction, creative nonfiction, essays, reviews and interviews appear in National Poetry Review, AGNI Online, Best American Poetry blog and American Literary Review. Her awards include an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award and residencies at Headlands Center for the Arts and Vermont Studio Center. A graduate of the NEOMFA, she is founding director of Lit Youngstown, a literary arts center for writers, readers and storytellers.

Appalachia has repeatedly suffered the wrecking balls of corporate greed.Our country’s virgin forests, mountain top removal, deep coal and strip mines and natural gas have attracted barons for centuries. Now, the life blood of our communities, hospitals are being felled like great oaks. The world over, Mother Earth bears her scars and her memory is long; deep in her marrow what has happened to her piles up inside a great kettle; eventually, like a volcano, it erupts. In response to Hurricane Helene’s historical flood and devastation to Western North Carolina the anthology of communal voices, the award winning Had I a Dove, edited by Hilda Downer was born. Poetry examines immediate and long-term implications of the event. Voices like Pauletta Hansel grieve for eastern Kentucky’s loss of lives, homes, roads and land, but also sing as communities come together celebrating survival. Jeanne Bryner is working on an anthology for voices affected by the closure of community hospitals. Pauletta Hansel is the former poet laureate of Cincinnati. Downer and Bryner are poets and retired registered nurses, all three are from Appalachia.

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Hilda Downer is the inaugural High Country Poet Laureate and author of four collections of Poetry and forthcoming chapbook, Seeds of Gems and Metals. She edited the anthology, Had I a Dove: Appalachian Poets on the Helene Flood released in September 2025 by Redhawk Publications with all proceeds going to a Helene Flood Relief Fund. Had I a Dove won the American Writing Award in the Poetry Anthology category and the Weatherford Award. Retired from teaching English at Appalachian State University, she is also a retired nurse. She lives in Sugar Grove, NC.

Jeanne Bryner’s family was part of Appalachia’s outmigration. A retired ER nurse, she’s a graduate of Trumbull Memorial Hospital’s School of Nursing and Kent State University’s Honors College. Her recent book, In Velvet: New & Selected Poems, Bottom Dog Press, received second place in the 2025 American Journal of Nursing Book of the Year Award.Her work has been adapted for the stagenationally and also the 2004 Fringe Festival in Edinburgh, Scotland.  She has received writing fellowships from Bucknell, the Ohio Arts Council (’97, ’07) and Vermont Studio Center. She lives near an Ohio dairy farm with her husband, David.

Pauletta Hansel is a poet, memoirist, and teacher whose eleventh book is a hybrid of poetry and prose entitled, Understory: A Woman’s History of Appalachia (University of Kentucky, 2026). Awards for her writing include the Poetry Society of Virginia’s 2023 North American Book Award, the Weatherford Award for Appalachian Poetry, and Judy Gaines Young Book Award. Born and raised in southeastern Kentucky, Pauletta was Cincinnati’s first poet laureate, and had been the Writer in Residence at Thomas More University, WordPlay Cincy, and the Cincinnati and Hamilton County Public Library.

How can writing poetry bring us into deeper relationship with the places we live and the scientific realities of our time? In this interactive panel, poet educators Farnaz Fatemi and Emilie Lygren will share their experiences in engaging youth in writing about place and the climate crisis. The workshop will include example poems from young people, ideas and approaches to engaging people of all ages in writing poetry in response to scientific information, and reflections on how writing poetry can support meaning-making and community building. The workshop will also include a generative prompt and space for questions from the audience.

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Emilie Lygren is a poet with nearly two decades of experience as an environmental educator and science curriculum developer. The author of two poetry collections, Emilie has also developed dozens of publications focused on nature journaling and environmental education through her work with the Lawrence Hall of Science at the University of California, Berkeley. Emilie lives in San Rafael, California, where she wonders about oaks and teaches poetry in local classrooms. In her writing and teaching, Emilie aims to bring people into relationship with place, self, and community. She holds a master’s degree in creative writing and a bachelor’s degree in Geology-Biology.

Farnaz Fatemi is an Iranian American poet and writer, and author of Sister Tongue (Kent State University Press). She has received fellowships from the California Arts Council, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the Academy of American Poets, and elsewhere. A founding member of the Hive Poetry Collective, Farnaz was poet laureate of Santa Cruz County, CA, 2023-2024. Two of Farnaz’s favorite laureate projects are:MappingMyPlace.com, a digital community space where Santa Cruz County residents can contribute lines or poems to an ongoing conversation about place, community, and the environment; and initiating and continuing to direct a Youth Poet Laureate Program.

Computational poetry is a genre that utilizes computer algorithms and tools to generate new work based on programmed constraints. In this session we will learn about the history of computational poetry, touch upon related movements such as Oulipo and dadaism, and observe how the rise of large language model has influenced contemporary poetry. We will also look at work by past computational poets as well as current users of the form such as Lillian-Yvonne Bertram and Katrine Øgaard Jensen.

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El Bentivegna is a poetry candidate in the NEOMFA program through Cleveland State University. They are the author of Confirm Humanity (Rockwood Press 2025) and their chapbook FUTUREQUEST is forthcoming from Ethel Zine in 2026. They were the recipient of the 2025 Academy of American Poets University and College Poetry Prize. Their work can be found in HAD, *82 Review, and others. El lives in Cleveland Heights with their husband and their four cats.

What does it mean to practice craft as an ethical mode of attention rooted in responsiveness, responsibility, and care? This session explores poetry as a form of perception, drawing from ecopoetics, traditions of nature writing, and practices of scientific observation. Bringing together editors and contributing poets from recent poetry anthologies responding to federal scientific assessments, the session considers how poetry sharpens attention, deepens listening, and supports a shared sense of stewardship. Through readings and generative exercises, we’ll ask: how might deliberate poetic choices become acts of witness, empathy, and stewardship?

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Luisa A. Igloria is the author of Caulbearer (Immigrant Writing Series Prize, Black Lawrence Press, 2024), 14 other books, and four chapbooks. She is lead editor of Dear Human at the Edge of Time: Poems on Climate Change in the United States (2023), offered as a companion to the Fifth National Climate Assessment (NCA5). Originally from Baguio City, she makes her home in Norfolk, VA where she is the Louis I. Jaffe and University Professor of English and Creative Writing at Old Dominion University. She also leads workshops for and is a member of the board of The Muse Writers Center. Luisa is the 20th Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia (2020-22), Emerita. During her term, the Academy of American Poets awarded her a 2021 Poet Laureate Fellowship. https://www.luisaigloria.com

Cassandra Bousquet is the 2023 Writer-In-Residence at Linden Place, a historic mansion and museum in Bristol RI. Some of her poems written about the complex history of the house told through the perspective of the linden trees that line the property, were published in the Linden Place Writer’s Residency alumni anthology, Our Secrets Run as Deep as Our Roots (2026). One of these poems first appeared in the anthology, The Nature of Our Times: Poems on America’s Lands, Waters, Wildlife, and Other Natural Wonders (2025). Cassandra was the 2024 recipient of the inaugural Poetry Lighthouse Prize and received an Honorable Mention from the Ruth Weiss Foundation in their 2024 poetry contest. Her poem, “Dear Human at the Edge of Time” appears in the 2023 anthology of the same title. Cassandra recently obtained a B.F.A. in Creative Writing, magna cum laude, from Roger Williams University and, along with her graduating creative writing class, published the anthology, Hippocampus: A Collection of Poetry and Prose on What It Means to Be Alive in 2026.

Eva Chen is a fourth-year student at Yale University majoring in Economics and East Asian Studies. In 2024, she spent eight weeks in Taiwan studying at Harvard Taipei Academy as a Richard U. Light Fellow. From 2022-23, she was the City of Burlingame’s Youth Poet-in-Residence. In 2023, she was named a California Emerging Artist Fellow. Her poetry has been recognized by the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards and featured in The Offing, Cathartic Literary Magazine, Catcher Zine, Elan Literary Magazine, KALW radio, and the anthology, Dear Human at the Edge of Time: Poems on Climate Change in the United States.

Aileen Cassinetto is a 2021 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow and winner of the 2025 Foley Poetry Prize. The co-founder of Paloma Press and author of An Immigrant’s Guide to Navigating Borders and Bodies of Water (2025), she is also co-editor of Dear Human at the Edge of Time: Poems on Climate Change in the United States (2023) and The Nature of Our Times: Poems on America’s Lands, Waters, Wildlife, and Other Natural Wonders (2025). https://aileencassinetto.com

Literary field guides offer creative ways of placemaking and methods of connecting the humanities to the environment. In this panel, learn tangible methods for creating your own Literary Field Guide for a National Park or ecologically significant area, from compiling species to recruiting poets, to balancing artistic interpretation with scientific fact. 

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Carrie George is a coeditor of Light Enters the Grove: Exploring Cuyahoga Valley National Park Through Poetry. Her chapbook Unbecoming won the 2024 Flume Press chapbook prize. She is the recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, and her work has appeared in DIAGRAM, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Florida Review, and elsewhere.

Charles Malone is assistant director of the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University. He is coeditor of Light Enters the Grove: Exploring Cuyahoga Valley National Park through Poetry. His poetry collections include After an Eclipse of Moths, Working Hypothesis, and Questions about Circulation.

For centuries, poetry was the primary form of science communication. Poets practiced the literary craft of creating memorable poetry that also communicated scientific knowledge. In this hybrid lecture and poetry reading, I will discuss the craft elements of creating science poetry with clear scientific information that still functions as art.

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Rebecca A. Durham is a poet, botanist, and artist. Durham holds an undergraduate degree in Biology, master’s degrees in Botany and Creative Writing, and an Interdisciplinary PhD. Winner of the 2019 Many Voices in Poetry Contest, her debut poetry collection Half-life of Empathy was published by New Rivers Press in 2020. Loss/Less, her second poetry manuscript, was chosen by Susan Howe for the Marsh Hawk Press Rochelle Ratner Memorial Award and published by Shanti Arts in 2022. Be Still Mere Molecule, an interdisciplinary exploration of poetry and science, was published in 2025 by Broken Tribe Press. She has worked across the west as a botanist and ecologist, with over twenty years in western Montana where she lives with her daughter. Find more of her work atrebeccadurham.net

Despite Americans’ near unanimous desire to live a long life, the U.S. is an ageist country. While pressuring us to look as young as we can, our popular culture presumes Americans of a certain age are out of touch, uncool, and, with rare exception, nowhere near the cutting edge of any art form except synchronized shuffleboard. Our popular culture is wrong. In this breakout session, which will include a writing exercise, a fellow of the American Psychological Association and the Gerontological Society of America and a prize-winning poet and fiction writer will share what research reveals about the surprising benefits of growing older and will discuss why the idea of the poet-prodigy is a myth.

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Dr. JoNell Strough is a professor and life-span developmental psychologist at West Virginia University. Dr. Strough is a fellow and member of the Gerontological Society of America and the American Psychological Association (Developmental, Adult Development and Aging Divisions). The author or coauthor of more than 50 journal articles or chapters, she has given more than 100 invited addresses or conference presentations. She completed her doctoral training at the University of Utah and her undergraduate studies at Boise State University in Idaho, graduating summa cum laude.https://psychology.wvu.edu/faculty-and-staff/faculty-directory/jonell-strough

Mark Brazaitis is the author of nine books, including The River of Lost Voices: Stories from Guatemala, winner of the 1998 Iowa Short Fiction Award, The Incurables: Stories, winner of the 2012 Richard Sullivan Prize and the 2013 Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award in Prose, and the novel American Seasons. His stories, essays, and poems have appeared in The Sun, Ploughshares, Michigan Quarterly Review, Witness, Guernica, and elsewhere. A former Peace Corps Volunteer and technical trainer, he is a professor of English at West Virginia University, where he directs the Creative Writing Program and the West Virginia Writers’ Workshop.www.markbrazaitis.com

When poems transcend genre and when animals transcend species, something incredible is made, both in the process of that boundary-crossing and its end result. In this presentation, we will present on the topic of chimeras and hybrids that spur on, enliven, queer, and shake up our worlds. Touching on topics including early human co-mingling with Neanderthals, the blurry lines between “species” and poetic forms, multigenre poetry and art, and the boundaries of what makes us (in)human, this panel seeks to explore and learn from our cross-boundary kin through a process of queering the art of science and the science of art with the ultimate goal of furthering our curiosity, wonder, and creative capacities.

This panel is conceived as part of the Lab Experiments with Language class, which is presented by Elizabeth Culotta, Scott Kenimond, and Valentine Shell, and includes contributions from Julia Cilano, Reid Kennedy, and Sophia Muhlenkamp.

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Elizabeth Culotta (she/her) is a consulting news editor at Science magazine and a fiction student at Kent State University in the NEOMFA program. With degrees in geology and paleontology, she spearheaded anthropology and evolution coverage at Science. In fiction and poetry, she uses human language to explore the natural world and our place in it. She lives in Kent, Ohio, with her husband, hound, and many trees.

Scott Kenimond (he/him) is a graduate student and TA in his third year of the NEOMFA at The University of Akron. He writes poetry, flash and micro fiction, creative nonfiction, and even dabbles in photography. His work has appeared in AshBelt, Villain Era Lit, CrayfishMag, and Does it Have Pockets. He believes one day he will be as big as his idol Madonna — if not already.

Valentine Shell (they/them) is a poetry student at Cleveland State University in the Northeast Ohio MFA program. They are a recipient of the Raab-Brennan Scholarship for Creative Writing. Their poetry has been published in the John Carroll Review. Their poetry and fiction centers around ideas of apocalypse, humanity and human boundaries, and queer theory and topics, using allusions to pop culture, classic literature, and folklore to create new images of what a story can be.

In an era when scientific knowledge is increasingly challenged, how can poetry respond—not just reflect, but engage? Featuring editors and contributors to Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance and Democracy, this panel explores the epistolary poem as a powerful form of public address. Panelists will share insights, writing prompts and practical strategies for using poetry to engage science, foster dialogue and invite broader participation—positioning poetry as a tool for connection, creativity and civic response.

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Simmons Buntin is the founding editor-in-chief of Terrain.org, the world’s first online literary magazine of place. He is the author of two books of poetry—Bloom and Riverfall—and a new collection of essays, Satellite: Essays on Fatherhood and Home, Near and Far. With Elizabeth Dodd and Derek Sheffield he is co-editor of Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy. He is also co-author of a collection of sustainable community case studies, Unsprawl: Remixing Spaces as Places. Simmons lives in Tucson, Arizona and can be found online at simmonsbuntin.com and urbanwild.substack.com.

Juan J. Morales is the author of four poetry collections, including Dream of the Bird Tattoo, winner of the 2026 Reading the West Book Award and The Handyman’s Guide to End Times, winner of the 2019 International Latino Book Award. Morales has received fellowships from CantoMundo, Macondo, and Longleaf Writers Conference. Recent poems have appeared in Verse Daily, The Slowdown Podcast, High Plains Pueblo Radio, and Inscape. He lives in Pueblo, Colorado, occasionally teaches for Lighthouse Writers in Denver, and is an Assistant Professor of English at Colorado College.

Laura-Gray Street is author of Pigment and Fume, Shift Work, and Just Labor, and co-editor of The Ecopoetry Anthology, A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia, and Attached to the Living World: A New Ecopoetry Anthology. She is the Mary Frances Williams Professor of English and edits Revolute at Randolph College.

Poets from physics, chemistry, and genetics discuss how the interplay of skills between disciplines opens new approaches to poetic craft. By detailing the genesis and refinement of a handful of poems, new perceptual, analytic, imaginative, and structural possibilities arise. This conversational presentation closes with strategies to spark new compositional pathways.

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Jan Conn is a poet, biologist, and visual artist. She holds a PhD from the University of Toronto and works at the New York State Department of Health on the population genetics and vector biology of mosquitoes that transmit Plasmodium parasites to humans, causing malaria. She conducts laboratory and field experiments mainly in Latin America. She is the author of ten poetry collections, the latest being Peony Vertigo (Brick Books, 2023), and is a member of the writing collaborative Yoko’s Dogs, whose most recent book of renga is Lunchbox Poems (Turret House Press, 2025). In both solo and collaborative modes, scientific practice has shaped the lenses, structures, and orientations at work in her poetry. She is the recipient of a CBC Poetry Prize, the inaugural P.K. Page Poetry Prize, and a Pushcart Prize nomination. Her visual art is represented by Lauren Clark Fine Art.www.janconn.com

Adrienne Drobnies is a poet and scientist from Vancouver, Canada. She has a PhD in chemistry from UC Berkeley, and worked as a research scientist at Simon Fraser University and as a project manager at the British Columbia Genome Sciences Centre. Her first book of poetry, Salt and Ashes, won the Fred Kerner Award from the Canadian Authors Association. She received the Gwendolyn MacEwen Award for a long poem entitled “Randonnées,” which was also a finalist for the Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC) prize for poetry. She is an editor of Standing on High Ground, an anthology of stories from those who resisted the Alberta-BC TMX pipeline expansion. Her second full-length manuscript of poetry, Solar Wind, continues her investigation of creative currents fed by both poetry and science.https://adriennedrobnies.com/

Lisa Rosenberg is a poet, essayist, and former space program engineer trained as a physicist. She developed solar arrays for satellites including the International Space Station, and has deep family ties to early NASA/JPL missions. She served as the second Poet Laureate of San Mateo County, CA, and has been recognized by a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, a Leonardo@Djerassi Residency, a MOSAIC America Fellowship, and book honors for her collections Weeds and Stars (2026) and A Different Physics (2018). Her poems explore natural and cultural landscapes, interconnectedness, and how patterns recur across domains. Since 2019, with poetry as her sustaining practice and lab, she has focused on public talks, workshops, and essays addressing process and systems skills essential to integrative and ecological thinking. www.Lisarosenberg.com 

Field Museum poet-in-residence Eric Elshtain will discuss the role a poet can play in a natural history museum and how poetry activates scientific spaces and enhances scientific truths. Using descriptions of interactions with museum visitors, researchers and scientists as well as visitors’ poems, collaborative poems with scientists and his own poems about museum/scientific objects, Elshtain will highlight poetry’s place in a scientific space. He will describe poetry as an instrument of engagement and understanding that helps visitors envision the museum not as a repository of scientific relics but a reliquary of our shared ideas about the world. 

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Eric Elshtain is a homemaker and has acted as the Field Museum’s poet-in-residence since 2017. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago’s Committee on the History of Culture, examining the use of poetry as a scientific instrument in 18th and 19th century natural history. https://www.fieldmuseum.org/blog/finding-poetry-natural-history

Panelists will discuss the legacy of ecological destruction resulting from colonialism, U.S. backed interventions in Latin America, extractive capitalism, and biodiversity loss in agriculture. They will read poems then share how research helped them understand and write about the climate crisis as a multipronged intersectional issue.

This session is sponsored by Letras Latinas, the literary initiative at Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies
https://latinostudies.nd.edu/news-events/letras-latinas

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Paul Hlava Ceballos is the author of banana [ ], which won the AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, and the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award. banana [ ] also was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and the Washington State Book Award. His collaborative chapbook, Banana [ ] / we pilot the blood, shares pages with Quenton Baker and Christina Sharpe. He has fellowships from CantoMundo, and the Poets House. He has been featured on the Poetry Magazine podcast and Seattle’s The Stranger. He currently is the poetry editor of the Seattle Met and practices echocardiography. https://www.paulhlava.com

Laura Villareal is a poet and book critic. Her debut poetry collection, Girl’s Guide to Leaving (University of Wisconsin Press 2022), was awarded Texas Institute of Letters’ John A. Robert Johnson Award for a First Book of Poetry and the Writers’ League of Texas Book Award for Poetry. ​She earned an MFA at Rutgers University—Newark and has been the recipient of fellowships and scholarships from the Stadler Center for Poetry and Literary Arts at Bucknell University, National Book Critics Circle’s Emerging Critics Program, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Dobie Paisano Fellowship Program at University of Texas-Austin, The Huntington, and CantoMundo. Her writing has further been supported by residencies at Oak Spring Garden Foundation. She is currently an associate with Letras Latinas, the literary initiative at the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies, where she co-edits and writes for Letras Latinas Blog 2, in addition to working on other related projects. https://www.lauravillareal.com

In this session, Dr. Clare Stacey and Dr. Heather Caldwell will lead a roundtable-style discussion on the impact of poetry on mental health outcomes. Findings from their partnership with the Wick Poetry Center using a poetry intervention called Healing Stanzas will be shared. Participants will have the opportunity to explore and interact with the Healing Stanzas writing tool and be asked to and reflect and their thoughts on possible approaches/avenues to support student mental health through poetry.

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Heather K Caldwell, PhD is Professor of Biological Sciences and Chair of Anthropology, Biological Sciences, and the School of Biomedical Sciences at Kent State University. Her work is focused on understanding the neural underpinnings of social behaviors and neuropsychiatric disorders, with a focus on the contributions of oxytocin and vasopressin. Dr. Caldwell received her BA and MS degrees in Biology from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, her PhD from Georgia State University, and completed her postdoctoral training at the National Institutes of Health in the National Institute of Mental Health. Dr. Caldwell joined the Kent State Faculty in 2007 and has served as the Graduate Coordinator for Biological Sciences and the Interim Associate Dean for Graduate Affairs in the College of Arts & Sciences. During her time at Kent State, she has also been the recipient of a Distinguished Advisor Award, an Excellence Award in Graduate Research Mentoring Award, and was an institutional winner of the Mid-American Conference Outstanding Faculty for Student Success. Relevant to this session, she is committed to working to promote mental wellness and her collaboration with Dr. Clare Stacey (Sociology) and David Hassler (Wick) has resulted in the development of the “Healing Stanzas” project, where reflective writing and mental health come together: https://healingstanzas.com/.

Clare L. Stacey is Associate Professor of Sociology & Criminology at Kent State University. She received her B.A. from UC Santa Barbara in 1995, PhD from UC Davis in 2004, and completed postdoctoral training at UC San Francisco 2022-2024. Dr. Stacey is a medical sociologist who studies how emotions shape and constrain the work of healthcare professionals and paraprofessionals. Her current project is a five year longitudinal study of empathy development in US medical students. Dr. Stacey works in collaboration with David Hassler and Dr. Heather Caldwell on Healing Stanzas, exploring how reading and writing poetry impacts acute mood in college undergraduates.

What if we could teach science and poetry together? Could such a STEAMy endeavor be rigorous, meaningful, and fun? As a poetry-positive marine biologist, I invite you to join me in this interactive workshop focused on the emergent, enriching, and occasionally terrifying experience of co-developing and co-delivering interdisciplinary biology-poetry courses with poets, artists, and scholars, for undergraduate, graduate, professional, practitioner, and public audiences. In this workshop you will (1) try out activities that invite learners into unfamiliar interdisciplinary interstices; (2) see sample student work; (3) apply a pedagogical framework to customize your own STEAMy educational philosophy and practice.

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Dr. Marjorie Wonham (she/they) is a Canadian marine ecologist who studies and teaches at the University of Washington’s Friday Harbor Laboratories on San Juan Island in Washington State. Her biology research and teaching focus on marine invertebrate zoology, and the impacts of introduced non-native species in coastal systems. Her pedagogical research and her teaching practice focus on cultivating self-authorship through guided inquiry. Marjorie has a passion for poetry-infused pedagogy, and co-teaches integrated, interactive science-arts courses and workshops for undergraduate students, graduate students, and the public.https://www.linkedin.com/in/marjorie-wonham-3443342b/

Poetry reading and writing engage participants, from young to old, in moving experiences that break down barriers, promote creativity and problem solving, and so much more. Poetry can promote connection to content such as environmental issues and be a stimulus for scientific observation and imagination. But how do we know that poetry makes a difference, other than in our gut? Join me to learn about evaluation strategies to narrow down potential outcomes of interest and then identify/develop surveys and focus group/interviews. I’ll also share tips on how to interpret results. 

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Bridget Mulvey loves science, language, and teaching. She holds undergraduate degrees in English and geology, a master’s degree in geology, and a Ph.D. in education. Currently, she is an associate professor of science education at Kent State University. She has conducted research on poetry writing experiences with education students. She has been awarded almost $8.5 million in grant funding, including two current federally funded projects. Bridget is an expert in the evaluation of projects and associated methods. https://scienceandcareer.weebly.com / https://3d-stem4elementary.weebly.com

Join Bow Seat: Creative Action for Conservation in a poetry workshop led by our award winning youth poets. Together we will explore how young people worldwide are discovering poetry as a vehicle for making meaning, creating connection, and inspiring action around the climate crisis. Come hear what global youth are experiencing and feeling as they navigate our ever changing world. Participants will have the opportunity for an interactive dialog with these young poets and a chance to share their own voices in creating a collective poetry piece that will generate a multi- generational call to action.

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Linda Cabot is a visual artist who credits a lifetime of sailing for her love affair with the ocean. She founded Bow Seat to inspire and support the next generation of ocean caretakers. She believes in the power of the arts to raise awareness about ocean conservation and enjoys seeing all the tremendous works of creativity and ingenuity that are submitted to the program. She serves on the Board of Women Working for Oceans (W2O) and is a trustee of the New England Aquarium. Linda is also devoted to educational reform and values quality education for all children. She serves on the boards of the Neighborhood House Charter School and Horizons, a summer enrichment program for underserved youth. She is co-chair of the education cornerstone committee and a trustee at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

Synodic, from the Greek σύνοδος meaning “meeting or assembly,” comes to us in astronomical terms as a moment of conjunction between heavenly bodies. Lunar phases, tidal locking, and orbital periods all help describe, as an object of scientific knowledge, the moon in the sky above us. But the moon also finds its place as an object of poetic knowledge, with a long history of writers trying to make sense of their own meetings and partings via the reflected light above them. This panel brings together three writers working through those places of convergence where both of these ways of knowing assemble in a single, poetic space.

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Lisa Ampleman is the author of the poetry collections: Mom in Space and Romances from LSU Press and Full Cry, winner of the Stevens Manuscript Competition sponsored by the National Federation of State Poetry Societies, and I’ve Been Collecting This to Tell You, winner of the Wick Poetry Center’s Ohio Chapbook Prize. Her poems appear widely, including at Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, 32 Poems, Georgia Review, Kenyon Review Online, New Ohio Review, New South, Poetry, Shenandoah, and Southern Review. She has received support from the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, the Ohio Arts Council, Sewanee Writers Conference, the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prizes, the Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies, and the Hermitage Artist Retreat. She is managing editor of The Cincinnati Review and poetry series editor at Acre Books. See more athttps://lisaampleman.com.

Julia Kolchinsky came to the United States as a Jewish refugee when she was six years old, from Dnipro, Ukraine. She is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently PARALLAX (The University of Arkansas Press, 2025), selected as finalist for the Miller Williams Prize by Patricia Smith. Her other books include of 40 WEEKS (YesYes Books, 2023), Don’t Touch the Bones, and The Many Names for Mother. Her next book, When the World Stopped Touching (YesYes Books, 2027), a collaborative collection with Luisa Muradyan.

Matthew Minicucci is an award-winning poet, translator, essayist, and the author of four books. His contributions have appeared widely including from APR, The Believer, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, Kenyon Review, Poetry, and American Public Media’s The Slowdown, hosted by Maggie Smith. His work has garnered numerous honors including the Stafford/Hall Oregon Book Award and the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize, along with fellowships from organizations including the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the National Parks Service, and the James Merrill House, among others. A long-time member of the board of advisors for Ninth Letter, the award-winning journal at the University of Illinois, he is currently an Assistant Professor in the Blount Scholars Program at the University of Alabama.

In 2021, artist Cadine Navarro recorded the sounds of prairie seeds, then via suminagashi created images by which visitors could experience the prairie anew. Using a facsimile of this exhibition, poet Terry Hermsen will invite a similar engagement, closing with poems and meditations inspired by Navarro’s deeply original art.

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Terry Hermsen is Professor Emeritus of English at Otterbein University in Westerville, Ohio. He has published five books of poems, including The River’s Daughter (2009), A House for Last Year’s Summer (2017) and most recently, Tiny Songs (2024). He published Poetry of Place with NCTE in 2009. He taught poetry 17 years at Otterbein, as well as for the Ohio Arts Council’s Artists in Education program. Since 2017, Terry has sought to bring together climate change initiatives across various area colleges, along with being part of the pollinator Pathway movement in central Ohio. Currently he is co-coordinator for a Pollinator Pathway chapter in Delaware and Marion Counties, helping individuals, schools and larger landowners transform sections of their lawns into native plant gardens and prairies. Website:https://www.terryhermsen.com/

Fear is an important natural instinct that keeps us safe. But in these difficult, rapidly changing times, how can poetry cultivate a space for us to slow down and focus on the microscopic, moving away from fear and into joy? Join us in exploring the poet’s power to create oxytocin through sound, imagery, and theme. Using examples from writers like Lynda Barry, Frank O’Hara, and Andrea Gibson, this panel will leave you with a little more hope than you came in with.

This panel is conceived as part of the NEOMFA’s Lab Experiments with Language class, which is presented by Julianne Metzger Taylor, Ashton Leigh, and Molly McLaughlin, and includes contributions from Dylan Baumgardner, Chloe DiMario, Isabella Kaufman, and Larry Nehring.

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Julianne Metzger Taylor (she/her) is a final-year NEOMFA fiction candidate in the NEOMFA through Kent State University. Her thesis project, Wish You Were Here, is a novel-in-stories about people at the beach that explores the complexities of joy, pleasure, and desire. Her work explores liminal spaces and the cost of connection. Julianne’s writing has appeared in The Raven Review, Crayfish Mag, and Navy Pen Lit, and was a semifinalist for the 2025 American Short(er) Fiction Prize. A U.S. Navy veteran, she now lives in Ohio with her family.

Ashton Leigh (they/them) is a creative nonfiction writer and poet. Pursuing their MFA in creative writing through the NEOMFA program, they focus their work on memory, loss, family, and finding joy as an act of resistance. They live in Northeast Ohio with their wife and two cats.

Molly McLaughlin (she/her) is a graduate student in the NEOMFA through Kent State University specializing in poetry and holds a BA in English and Creative Writing from Case Western Reserve University. Her work focuses on the interplay between wrangled landscapes such as Cleveland, family dynamics and identity, and belonging and regionality.

For those who want to write about biodiversity loss and extinction, engaging with scientific research can be an invaluable source of inspiration and can shape and inform the writing process. In this breakout panel, three poets— Oni Buchanan, Ching-In Chen, and Eleni Sikelianos—will discuss their process of writing poetry with, through, and out of scientific papers for the book Creature Needs: Writers Respond to the Science of Animal Conservation (University of Minnesota Press, 2025). They will offer a craft-based look at the process and praxis of writing based on scientific articles and research, and explore the significance of incorporating scientific research in all its complexity and precision. Panelists will provide insight into a variety of approaches writers can take, address how writing based on science can be a lens through which larger issues can be explored, and speak to the impact that literary works can have when they include scientific research and its ways of gaining insight into the world.

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Oni Buchanan is the author of four poetry books: Time Being (October 2020), Must A Violence (2012), Spring (2008), and What Animal (2003). She is the founder and director of Ariel Artists, a management company designed for musicians who are expanding and re-contextualizing classical music for the 21st century. In 2020, Buchanan launched the Ariel AVANT innovation platform, as well as the AR/VR/MR performance concourse, ImmerSphere.

Ching-In Chen is a genderqueer Chinese American writer, community organizer and teacher. They are the author of The Heart’s Traffic (Arktoi/Red Hen Press, 2009), recombinant (Kelsey Street Press, 2017; winner of the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry) and Shiny City (Airlie Press, 2025). They are also the author of chapbooks to make black paper sing (speCt! Books, 2019) and Kundiman for Kin :: Information Retrieval for Monsters (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2020), which was a Leslie Scalapino Finalist. They are currently collaborating with Cassie Mira on Breathing in a Time of Disaster, a performance, installation and speculative writing project exploring breath through meditation, health and environmental justice.

Eleno Sikelianos is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Your Kingdom (Coffee House Press, 2023) and The Loving Detail of the Living & the Dead (Coffee House Press, 2013). She is also the author of a trilogy of hybrid memoirs, the most recent being Memory Rehearsal (City Lights, 2026). Her work has been translated into over a dozen languages, and she has translated three books from the French by Mohamed Leftah, Sabine Macher, and Jacques Roubaud. She currently teaches poetry in the literary arts department at Brown University.

How does a poet honor the precision and strangeness of scientific information while maintaining lyrical intensity? How does a poet let a reader feel the force of a geological epoch, the elegance of a protein fold, the violence of ecosystem collapse—without losing either the science or the music? Drawing on their own work and the broader tradition, the presenters examine specific craft tools poets have used to hold scientific precision and lyrical power in the same space.

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Charlotte Pence is the MFA Director at Texas State University, Mobile, Alabama’s inaugural Poet Laureate, and a 2024 Academy of American Poets laureate fellow. Her collection Code, winner of the 2020 Book of the Year award from the Alabama State Poetry Society, explores birth and death through the lens of DNA. Her first collection, Many Small Fires (Black Lawrence Press, 2015), winner of the silver award from Foreword Reviews, weaves personal experience of her father’s homelessness with the physiological changes that enabled humans to form cities, communities, and households.

Brian Turner is a poet, with five collections of poetry, from Here, Bullet to The Wild Delight of Wild Things (Alice James Books). He’s written a memoir, My Life as a Foreign Country (W.W. Norton & Co.), served as the editor of The Kiss (W.W. Norton & Co.) and co-edited The Strangest of Theatres (McSweeney’s/Poetry Foundation). He’s the founding Director of the MFA program in Lake Tahoe, and he lives in Florida with his dog, Dene, the world’s sweetest golden retriever.

Erika Meitner is the author of seven books of poems, includingHoly Moly Carry Me (BOA Editions, 2018), winner of the 2018 National Jewish Book Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry;Useful Junk(BOA Editions, 2022); andAssembled Audience(Milkweed Editions, 2026). Her poems have been published most recently inThe New Yorker, Orion,The New Republic, Virginia Quarterly Review,Oxford American,Poetry, and elsewhere. Meitner is currently a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she directs the Creative Writing program. 

Appalachian writers document landscapes under pressure through poetry and prose rooted in lived experience. Drawing on three anthology projects, this panel explores flooding, mountain foodways, and consumer culture as everyday expressions of environmental science. Centering voices of farmers, flood survivors, and community members, it examines storytelling as place-based science communication. These narratives preserve ecological knowledge, reveal the impacts of extraction and consumption, and illuminate how communities adapt and endure amid climate instability.

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Amy Le Ann Richardson is a writer, educator, and advocate based on her family farm in Carter County, Kentucky. She is the author of three poetry collections, including Out of Places (Pine Row Press), and editor of the forthcoming anthology Rooted, Resilient, Rising: Women Growing Food across the Mountains (University Press of Kentucky). Her work appears in Still: The Journal, Appalachian Journal, and Kentucky Monthly. She leads the Bloodroot Young Writers Collective and is an inaugural National Arts Futures Fellow. She holds an MFA from Spalding University and has received Kentucky Foundation for Women grants supporting her writing and environmental advocacy. https://amyleannrichardson.com/

Melissa Jørgenrud Helton is Literary Arts Director of Hindman Settlement School. Her work has been in Shenandoah, Women of Appalachia Project, Still: The Journal, and more. Her chapbooks include Inertia: A Study, and Hewn. She is editor of the anthology Troublesome Rising: A Thousand-Year Flood in Eastern Kentucky and Untelling, the literary and arts magazine. Her work has been supported through the Kentucky Foundation for Women and has been awarded prizes in poetry and nonfiction. She taught in colleges and universities for 17 years and is a dual citizen in the UK. https://hindman.org/

Like mushrooms fruiting after rain, poems can illuminate mycelial networks in a way that upends our understandings of individuality and ecology. Addressing the recent “fungal turn,” panelists will discuss how the science of fungi offers new (and old) understandings of kinship, death, symbiosis, and our own interdependence with ecological systems.

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Mildred K. Barya writes about homing, belonging, and relations with the more-than-human world. Two of her recent poetry collections were listed among Brittle Paper Notable African Books, and The Animals of My Earth School received honorable mention in the 2024 Eric Hoffer Poetry Award. Her work appears in New England Review, The Cincinnati Review, Prairie Schooner, and intersects the fields of ecopoetics, environmental humanities, and social justice. Hands in Clay is her fifth poetry collection.

Anne Haven McDonnell’s second full-length collection is Singing Under Snow (winner of the Wheelbarrow Prize at MSU Press). She is a recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts and MacDowell, and her work appears in Orion Magazine,Terrain.org, Ecotone, and elsewhere. A co-editor of poetry forTerrain.org, she lives in Santa Fe, NM where she is a professor at the Institute of American Indian Arts.

Lesley Wheeler’s sixth poetry collection, Mycocosmic, invokes mycelium as inspiration for metabolizing loss and generating restorative connections. Her work has been supported by Fulbright, the NEH, and Bread Loaf Environmental and appears in Orion, Ecotone, Poetry, and Poets & Writers. Poetry Editor of Shenandoah, they live in Virginia. (she/they)

UniVERSE is a planetarium feature film by O, Miami and Topos Graphics for The Philip and Patricia Frost Museum of Science Planetarium in Miami, produced as a Knight New Work project. Featuring multilingual poems by South Florida residents and K-12 students, the film travels through coral reefs, coastlines, cityscapes, the Everglades and skies before venturing into outer space. Combining immersive visuals with readings by South Florida poets, UniVERSE is a joyful meditation on place, imagination, and the relationship between Miami and the cosmos. The project expands O, Miami’s Civic Publishing practice by elevating community voices on an epic public scale.  

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Caroline Cabrera is a poet and educator from South Florida. She is author of the lyric essay collection (lack begins as a tiny rumble) from Tinderbox Editions, as well as three poetry collections, most recently, Saint X, winner of the Hudson Prize from Black Lawrence Press. She serves as Artistic Director for O, Miami and lives in Fort Lauderdale.

Melody Santiago Cummings is a strategic thinker and empathetic leader who serves as the Executive Director at O, Miami, where she’s been advancing community-centered poetry and publishing initiatives that reimagine public space and civic identity since 2013. Melody is a proud first-generation Miamian of Puerto Rican and Cuban heritage.

This session will focus on what we have learned (as a chemist and a literary scholar) in developing an interdisciplinary seminar examining creativity in STEM and the humanities for Otterbein University’s general education program.  Possible topics include course resources, structure, and logistics, as well as student responses to the class.  

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Carrigan Hayes is a faculty member at Otterbein University in Westerville, Ohio; she teaches in the Department of Chemistry, and she led the campus’s Integrative Studies Program (general education) from 2020-2025. Follow her on Bluesky: @chemphasis.bsky.social.

Margaret Koehler is a faculty member at Otterbein University in Westerville, Ohio; she teaches in the Department of English, which she chaired from 2018-2023. Follow her on Bluesky: @margaretmaryk.bsky.social.

The Sun & Moon Poetry Festival grew from a single event designed specifically to bring poets and scientists together, marrying astronomy-themed poetry and night-sky viewing. Expanding to include nature hikes, workshops, and more, the full-fledged festival continues, more than ten years later, to successfully engage participants in nature-themed, ecology-based poetry.

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Paula J. Lambert has published five full-length poetry collections including Terms of Venery, Revised (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions 2025) and six chapbooks. Lambert, also a literary translator, was awarded the 2021 PEN America – L’Engle Rahman Prize for Mentorship. Her work has been supported by the Ohio Arts Council, the Greater Columbus Arts Council, and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. Lambert owns Full/Crescent Press, a small publisher of poetry books and broadsides, through which she has founded and supported numerous public readings and festivals that support the intersection of poetry and science, including the Sun & Moon Festival now hosted by the Ohio Poetry Association. She lives in Columbus, Ohio, with her husband, Dr. Michael Perkins, a philosopher and technologist.www.paulajlambert.com

Chuck Salmons has served as a leader for the Ohio Poetry Association for over a decade. His poems have appeared in journals and anthologies including Chiron Review, The Fib Review, Evening Street Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Main Street Rag, Northern Appalachia Review, and I Thought I Heard a Cardinal Sing: Ohio’s Appalachian Voices. He has published four poetry collections: Stargazer Suite (11thour Press); Patch Job (NightBallet Press); The Grace of Gazing Inward: Poems in Response to the Art of Alice Carpenter (Dos Madres Press); and Surviving the Eremocene, his fourth book, released in autumn 2025 by Sheila-Na-Gig Editions. Chuck received a 2018 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award for poetry.chucksalmons.com

Holly Brians Ragusa is an interdisciplinary writer, poet, speaker, activist and author. Her works include the awarded Met the End, as well as Dying to Know Myself In Time and poetry collections Inverse, Tilt a World and is contributor to Psychology Today and Opinion contributor to The Cincinnati Enquirer and USA Today. Serving as President for Ohio Poetry Association. With more than 25 years of nonprofit work, HBR champions literary endeavors, human rights and survivorship, and led development for the America’s River Roots Freedom Journey and Riverwalk Cincy App. Entrenched in the community, she lives with her family in historic Over-the-Rhine.hollybriansragusa.com

International treaty protects outer space, but a lunar gold rush is underway. What’s at stake for Earth’s planetary partner? What can a poem do in the face of geopolitics and space profiteering? At this transformational moment, we consider how poetry might impact the future of the Moon, and beyond.

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Former Santa Clara County (CA) Poet Laureate, Sally Ashton is a teaching poet and writer, editor of DMQ Review, and Faculty Emerita at San José State University. She’s the recipient of fellowships from Montalvo Arts Center, Prospect Street Writers House, and SVCreates. Author of five books and publishing across three genres, Ashton recent work reflects her inquiries into Einstein’s theory of relativity (The Behaviour of Clocks, 2019), quantum physics, the cosmos, and into the race to space (Listening to Mars, 2024). With her poem “4.6 Billion Years” now archived on the Moon, Going to the Moon, a book of essays reflecting on her experience, is forthcoming from Duke University Press, July 2026.sallyashton.comwww.dmqreview.com

Allison Blevins (she/her) is the queer disabled author of four collections and six chapbooks of both poetry and prose. Winner of the 2024 Barthelme Prize, the 2023 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award, and the 2022 Laux/Millar Poetry Prize, Allison serves as the publisher of Small Harbor Publishing. Her forthcoming collection Black Hole Experiments for Ladies (Persea, 2027) juxtaposes black holes in space and black holes on MRI reports and investigates the work of Janna Levin, Andrea Ghez, and Katie Mack. Using cosmology, astronomy, and neurology, this collection answers the question: How can the lyric connect the personal to the astronomical?allisonblevins.com

Lisa Rosenberg is a poet, essayist, and former space program engineer trained as a physicist. She developed solar arrays for satellites including the International Space Station, and has deep family ties to early NASA/JPL missions. She served as the second Poet Laureate of San Mateo County, CA, and has been recognized by a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, a Leonardo@Djerassi Residency, a MOSAIC America Fellowship, and book honors for her collections Weeds and Stars (2026) and A Different Physics (2018). Her poems explore natural and cultural landscapes, interconnectedness, and how patterns recur across domains. Since 2019, with poetry as her sustaining practice and lab, she has focused on public talks, workshops, and essays addressing process and systems skills essential to integrative and ecological thinking. www.Lisarosenberg.com 

Poetry, Meditation, and Voice: Emptying the Vessel invites writers into a contemplative and creative process that softens habitual narratives, suspends certainty, and cultivates awareness. Pairing contemplation and poetry with meditation and writing, the session quiets internal noise, allowing language to emerge from the imaginative depth via the conduit cultivated. Reflection and sharing explore how silence shapes authentic voice, how perception shifts through meditation, and how poetic language can express complexity and psychological experience. Participants practice the state of receptivity, awareness, and responsiveness making space for clearer voice, deeper listening, and a renewed relationship to creativity and expression.

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Joel David Lesses is President and Executive Director of Education Training Center, Inc. and his work experience is in education, psychology, and counseling for people marginalized by trauma, addiction, and psychological distress. He is deeply vested in addressing the effects of mental health distress and its marginalization including, incarceration, homelessness, and institutionalization. Joel is dedicated to reframing mental health distress as a potential spiritual marker and existential opportunity. Education Training Center, Inc. is founded with deep and impassioned curiosity and exploration of psychology. It is a 501(c)(3) not for profit offering counseling and programs through education, inclusion, guidance, and support. Education Training Center, Inc. places high value on educating individuals and our community about mental health as a potential opportunity, and through education how to enhance our support of people in mental health distress, including counseling, consultancy with organizations, trainings, and community events. Programs offered by Education Training Center include the Unraveling Religion podcast, and the Ground and Sky Poetry Series, Kyosei Meditation Program, Manjushri Press, and Oak Tree Films.

The panelist-readers will address consonances and dissonances between different forms of giving/taking care: that of the diagnostician, that of the healer, that of the poet (or her critic), and that of the parent. As Lucy Alford contends in her Forms of Poetic Attention, poetry works with and shapes attention as its medium, at times beyond what’s immediately legible in the words at hand. Making, reading, and performing poetry each differently cultivate attention, as do the diverse demands of parenthood and medical practice. As poets who are also full-time physicians and parents of young children, Kolbe, Leo, and Okrent think together about sorting and selecting modes of attention-giving and caregiving when faced with the day’s demands.  

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Laura Kolbe (MD, MPhil) is a physician, medical ethicist, and writer. Her poems have appeared in the Best American Poetry series and in American Poetry Review, The Baffler, Conjunctions, Harper’s, n+1, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Poetry, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. Her first collection, Little Pharma, won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize and was published by the University of Pittsburgh in 2021. Her chapbook Keeping House: Six Longer Love Poems was selected by Kwame Dawes as the Center for Book Arts annual contest winner and published in 2025, and her second full-length collection, The Decadent Movement, will be published in September 2026 by the University of Pittsburgh. She teaches and practices medicine in New York City. More about her work can be found at www.laura-kolbe.com.

John Okrent’s first book, This Costly Season, was published by Arrowsmith Press in 2022 and has since been adapted for the stage by The Poets’ Theatre. He is the recipient of a Puschart Prize, The Poetry International Prize, and The Jeff Marks Memorial Prize. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Seattle Times, The Yale Review, Ploughshares, The Poetry Review (UK), Oxford Poetry (UK), and elsewhere. He works as a family doctor at a community health center in Tacoma, WA.

Timothy Leo is the author of The Dog’s Letter, a sequence of poetry from Ugly Duckling Presse. His writing may also be found in Annulet, Conjunctions, Denver Quarterly, Lana Turner, Narrative, Of Latitudes Unknown: James Baldwin’s Radical Imagination, and elsewhere. He co-edits dialogist with poet-biophysicist Angelo Mao, and he is a contributing editor with Peripheries: A Journal of Word & Image. His work has been supported by Harvard’s Department of Global Health & Social Medicine, The Rhodes Trust, and the Vermont Studio Center. He is completing training in surgery at the University of Chicago.

What can poetry do with magnitude? From gut flora to cosmic events written in trees, from molecular agencies to the vast temporalities of galaxies, scale is rich territory for both scientists and poets. This panel brings together three poets at the intersection of science and lyric to explore how language, metaphor, and scientific inquiry make the invisibly small and incomprehensibly large suddenly visible—and emotionally alive. Moving from micro to macro and back, panelists draw on their own work alongside that of other contemporary poets to examine how poetic practice expands our capacity to imagine complex systems and deep time.

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Maggie Greaves is associate professor of poetry and poetics at Skidmore College. Her research focuses on poetry and poetics, world literature, and the history of science. She is the author of Lyric Poetry and Space Exploration from Einstein to the Present (Oxford University Press, 2023), as well as essays on modern and contemporary poetry published in Genre, Contemporary Literature, The Journal of Modern Literature, and Comparative American Studies, The Oxford Handbook of Literature and Science, and elsewhere. Her poems have appeared in such magazines as The Missouri Review, North American Review, Literary Matters, and The Seneca Review, and she has been nominated for multiple Pushcart Prizes.

Sarah Giragosian is the author of the poetry collections Queer Fish, a winner of the American Poetry Journal Book Prize (Dream Horse Press, 2017), and The Death Spiral (Black Lawrence Press, 2020). In 2023, the University of Akron Press published the craft anthology Marbles on the Floor: How to Assemble a Book of Poems, which she co-edited. In 2024, Middle Creek Press released Mother Octopus, a co-winner of the Halcyon Prize. Her writing is forthcoming in Orion and Hanging Loose. She teaches at the University at Albany-SUNY.

Radha Marcum won the 2023 Washington Prize for her poetry collection Pine Soot Tendon Bone and the New Mexico Book Award in 2018 for her first collection, Bloodline, about her grandfather’s work building the first atomic bombs during World War II. Praised for its rare synthesis of lyric and scientific intelligence, her poetry appears in journals including Conjunctions, EcoTheo, Kenyon Review, and Quarterly West. An award-winning prose writer focused on health and environmental issues, Marcum has written for American Rivers, Colorado Water Trust, Outside, and The Wilderness Society. She lives in Colorado where she teaches at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop.

Abstracts, bibliographies, syllabi, and the scientific documents in between.  We’ll look at poems that are not just ‘found’ but that have repurposed the conventions of science writing to push their poetry forms, so that you can as well.

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Christa Fairbrother, MA, has been a teacher of art and movement for over twenty years. She’s had poetry in Bellingham Review, Crannog, Epiphany, Pleiades, and Salamander, among others. Currently, she’s Gulfport, Florida’s poet laureate and a poetry editor at Phylum Press. She’s been a finalist for the Leslie McGrath Poetry Prize, the Wilder Prize, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize twice. Her chapbook, The Specialists, will be published by Querencia Press in 2026. Her book, Water Yoga (Singing Dragon, 2022), won medals from the Nautilus Book Awards and the Florida Writers Association. Connect with her atwww.christafairbrotherwrites.com, on IG @christafairbrotherwrites, or BlueSky @christafairbrother.

Three Minnesota-based writers will discuss what science and poetry have offered one another in their work, each with reference to a specific poetry/multimedia project: Anna’s community-sourced seven-word nature poems; Natalie’s incorporation of found and archival How do we integrate environmental problems and personal narratives to understand and show what is at stake? Carolyn Williams-Noren’s poetry collection is a memoir of complicity. Anna Farro Henderson’s essays share the lived experience of conducting climate science research and working in politics. Beyond our own lyric and poetry, how can we use public art to integrate nature, science, and environmental problems into how communities see themselves?
in long-poem artist’s books on disasters close to home; and Carolyn’s series of poems recalling science fair projects to interrogate a childhood reliant on the oil industry.

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Anna Farro Henderson is a writer and a PhD scientist. For her first book, Core Samples: A Climate Scientist’s Experiments in Politics and Motherhood, a 2024 Foreword INDIES winner, she did over fifty-five public speaking events at bookstores, public libraries, and universities. Her publications have appeared in Science, Lit Hub, and Orion, among others (she previously published as E.A. Farro). She has taught at University of Minnesota Humphrey School of Public Affairs, Mitchell Hamline Law School, the Grand Marais Art Colony, Write on Door County, the Loft Literary Center, and numerous libraries. She is online at www.annafarrohenderson.com.

Poet and essayist Carolyn Williams-Noren has cohabitated with scientists her entire life. Her poetry collection, Oil Courses (2026), which reckons with her childhood close to the oil industry in Alaska, won the 2025 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize. Carolyn’s work has been in AGNI, Prairie Schooner, The Iowa Review, Willow Springs, and many other journals. She lives in Minneapolis, where she freelances as a copy editor and writer and sends subscribers a handwritten, hand-drawn recipe comic called “This is good.” See more at williams-noren.com.

Through the interactive game “Walking the 500 Years,” participants will learn of the Tempest Project’s exploration of the long history of colonization, contemporary ecological realities, and related music and poetry. As Chilean poet Christian Formoso asks, can we coin a “more vast, luminous and inclusive memory,” and “open ourselves to a plural consciousness”?

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Jeff Gundy’s fourteen books of poetry and nonfiction include the new Reports from an Interior Province: New and Selected Poems (Dos Madres), Wind Farm: Landscape with Stories and Towers (Dos Madres, creative nonfiction, 2023) and Without a Plea (Bottom Dog, poems, 2019). His work appears in Georgia Review, The Sun, River Teeth, Kenyon Review, Forklift, Ohio, Christian Century, Cincinnati Review, andTerrain.org. His awards include a 2008 Fulbright lectureship in Salzburg, the Midwest Book Award for Spoken Among the Trees, numerous Ohio Arts Council fellowships, Ohio Poet of the Year for Somewhere Near Defiance, and a major grant from the Seattle Foundation. He is Poet in Residence and Professor Emeritus of English at Bluffton University.

Terry Hermsen is Professor Emeritus of English at Otterbein University in Westerville, Ohio. He has published five books of poems, including The River’s Daughter (2009), A House for Last Year’s Summer (2017) and most recently, Tiny Songs (2024). He published Poetry of Place with NCTE in 2009. He taught poetry 17 years at Otterbein, as well as for the Ohio Arts Council’s Artists in Education program. Since 2017, Terry has sought to bring together climate change initiatives across various area colleges, along with being part of the pollinator Pathway movement in central Ohio. Currently he is co-coordinator for a Pollinator Pathway chapter in Delaware and Marion Counties, helping individuals, schools and larger landowners transform sections of their lawns into native plant gardens and prairies.

Colonial pastoral poetry idealizes retreats to stolen land, where Indigenous people are backdrops for non-Native musings upon “simpler ways of life, reducing us to noble savage stereotypes. Billy-Ray Belcourt reminds us that poetry is “the impossibility of total conquest…a love song to the land.” How can Indigenous anti-pastoralism challenge the romanticization of nature through love songs to land that challenge the “impossibility” of colonial methodologies? How do Indigenous poets re-appropriate the “shepherd figure,” binding body to land on our own terms? Three emerging Indigenous poets will share their poetry, discussing how challenging the pastoral yields answers to these questions.

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Pōmaikaʻi Gushiken is a queer Kanaka ʻŌiwi and Uchinaanchu writer from Nānākuli, Hawaiʻi, living in Tovaangar (“Los Angeles”).  Their writing has appeared in Color Bloq, Abolition Journal, pacificREVIEW, The Hawaiʻi Review, The Hawaiʻi Pacific Review, and Hūlili: Multidisciplinary Research on Hawaiian Well-Being. They are an Indigenous Nations Poets fellow, recipient of the Māhealani Dudoit Creative Writing Residency, and hold a PhD in Ethnic Studies from UC San Diego. 

Halee Kirkwood’s debut poetry collection, To Think Of A Match, is forthcoming in March 2027 with Triquarterly, and their travel memoir, Heartsong Cartography, is forthcoming with University of Minnesota Press in early 2028. They are a 2023-2025 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, an Indigenous Nations Poets fellow, and were the recipient of the 2022 James Welch Prize. Their work has been published in POETRY, Gulf Coast, Beloit Poetry Journal, and more. They are a direct descendant of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe.

Chris Hoshnic is a Diné poet, playwright, and filmmaker from Sweetwater, Arizona. His work explores migratory poetics, a method that examines how movement, both literal and metaphorical, reshapes Diné language, identity, and belonging. Recipient of the Poetry Northwest 2025 James Welch Prize, Hoshnic’s work appears in POETRY, Kenyon Review, and beyond. He is Editor-in-Chief of Chapter House Journal and directs Diné Kids Film Club.

After being asked to serve as poet-in-residence at a mastodon paleontology conference in 2017, Christina Olson wrote The Last Mastodon, which won the 2019 Rattle Chapbook prize. Now Christina joins the Western Science Center in Hemet, California, annually at their Valley of the Mastodons conference to lead writing workshops, conduct research, and gather new materials for poems and essays. This panel will tell her story as well as give audience members ideas for how to collaborate with their local museums or institutions. (Attendees will receive a copy of The Last Mastodon.)

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Christina Olson is the author of The Anxiety Workbook (Pitt Poetry Series, 2023), which was a finalist for the Georgia Author of the Year award, and The Last Mastodon (Rattle, 2019). Other work appears in The Atlantic, The Nation, Scientific American, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Best Creative Nonfiction. She is a professor of creative writing at Georgia Southern University and lives online at www.thedrevlow-olsonshow.com.

Just as the universe’s physical laws constrain matter, energy, and motion, poems are constrained by medium, textual and literary conventions, and principles of language. Presenters will share celestial poems by others and themselves to discuss form, design, language, and how the self—speaker, subject, reader—is variously positioned.

Lisa Ampleman is the author of the poetry collections: Mom in Space and Romances from LSU Press and Full Cry, winner of the Stevens Manuscript Competition sponsored by the National Federation of State Poetry Societies, and I’ve Been Collecting This to Tell You, winner of the Wick Poetry Center’s Ohio Chapbook Prize. Her poems appear widely, including at Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, 32 Poems, Georgia Review, Kenyon Review Online, New Ohio Review, New South, Poetry, Shenandoah, and Southern Review. She has received support from the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, the Ohio Arts Council, Sewanee Writers Conference, the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prizes, the Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies, and the Hermitage Artist Retreat. She is managing editor of The Cincinnati Review and poetry series editor at Acre Books. See more at https://lisaampleman.com.

Monica Ong is a visual poet and the author of Silent Anatomies from Kore Press. Her most recent series of astronomy-inspired visual poetry was exhibited at the Poetry Foundation and is the basis of her new book Planetaria from Proxima Vera. A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, Ong brings a designer’s eye to experimental writing with her hybrid image-poems and installations that surface hidden narratives of women and diaspora. Her poetry can be found in Scientific American, ctrl+v, and Poetry and in the anthology A Mouth Holds Many Things: A De-Canon Hybrid-Literary Collection from Fonograf Editions. In 2024, she was named a United States Artists Fellow. See more at https://monicaong.com.

Anna Leahy’s poetry collections include If in Some Cataclysm from Glass Lyre Press, What Happened Was: from Small Harbor Editions, Aperture from Shearsman Books, and Constituents of Matter, which won the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize. She is the author of the nonfiction book Tumor from Bloomsbury, and her essays have won awards from Mississippi Review, Los Angeles Review, Ninth Letter, and Dogwood. Her work appears at Aeon, Atlanta Review, The Atlantic, Bennington Review, Poetry, Scientific American, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. She has been a fellow at MacDowell, Joshua Tree National Park, and the American Library in Paris. See more at https://amleahy.com.

Wonder unites science and poetry. Put simply, how amazing is the natural world and our place in it??!! Scientists learn quickly to expect the unexpected in their findings. Earth will always surprise, shock, and delight you. Poets want to channel that sense of wonder into their work – such that (hopefully) the reader is also surprised, shocked, and delighted. This panel explore how the concept of wonder shows up in in our lives and what that means for our work.

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Emily Knight serves as the Director of Outreach and Engagement for the Blue Convergence Fund, a non-profit philanthropic organization dedicated to supporting projects that foster sustainable oceans and coasts. Emily holds a master’s degree in Oceanography from the University of Maine as well as an MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers. Her most recent publications appeared in the online gallery and print anthology, The Nature of Our Times: Poems on America’s Lands, Waters, Wildlife, and Other Natural Wonders, Fish Barrell Review, and Thimble Lit Magazine.   

Phillip Levin is a professor at the University of Washington and Interim Executive Director of UW’s EarthLab. He directs United by Nature, 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.

Kathryn Semmens is the Science Director of the Nurture Nature Center located in Easton, Pennsylvania. Kathryn’s interests focus on the nexus of science, art, and community. Kathryn helps advance Nurture Nature Center’s science, education, community, and outreach efforts on scientific and environmental issues generally, with a special emphasis on floods, social science research about risk communication, climate change and resiliency, community science, and the integration of science and art.  She completed a Ph.D. in environmental and earth sciences from Lehigh University, a master’s degree in marine policy from the University of Delaware, a bachelor of science in environmental studies from Ursinus College and worked as a postdoctoral associate at the USDA Agricultural Research Service.

In this panel, editors from three generations of literary field guides (from the Sonoran Desert, Cascadia, and the Rocky Mountains) will discuss their process as makers and editors of a growing series of anthologies that foster connections between people and place. Integrating Western science and Indigenous ecological knowledge with poetry and art, these field guides cultivate a sense of wonder for bioregional ecosystems and the diverse beings of each region. Working in the rich ecotone where science and poetry meet, the editors will discuss the challenges and inspirations of the making of these books.

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Anne Haven McDonnell is a naturalist, poet, and professor of English and Creative Writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts (2023) and MacDowell, she is the author of Singing Under Snow (winner of the Wheelbarrow Prize at MSU Press), Breath on a Coal (winner of the Halcyon Poetry Prize), and the chapbook Living with Wolves. She is a co-creator of the forthcoming Rocky Mountains Literary Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry (spring 2027), and she edits poetry forTerrain.org.

Eric Magrane is an associate professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at New Mexico State University. He is editor of the books The Sonoran Desert: A Literary Field Guide and Geopoetics in Practice. He has published widely in scholarly and literary journals, such as in BioScience, Ecotone,Terrain.org, and in the books Counter-Desecration: A Glossary for Writing Within the Anthropocene and Big Energy: When Ecopoets Think Climate Change. He earned an MFA in poetry and a PhD in geography from the University of Arizona.

The 8th poet laureate of Washington State, Derek Sheffield has been teaching, writing, and presenting in the liminal place between poetry and science for over twenty years. His books include Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry, Not for Luck, and Dear America. His awards include the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, the Foreword Reviews Indies Book of the Year in Nature Writing, and the Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize. When he’s not in the woods along the eastern slopes of the Cascade Range near Leavenworth, Washington, he is editing poetry forTerrain.org.

In Jewish Ecopoetry, Jewish cultural identity and heritage interconnect with environmental awareness. Beginning with the Genesis creation myth and its injunction “to till and tend the earth,” Jewish literature abounds with environmental concern. Three Jewish poets will share poems and conversation about how their cultural heritage impacts their relationships with the more-than-human and the poetry they write. The panel will address topics such as the intersection of cultural and scientific understandings of nature; climate grief as contemporary lamentation; intergenerational trauma and antisemitism in relation to environmental destruction; and how poetry can be a tool for addressing the urgent environmental issues of our time. 

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Hila Ratzabi is the author of the poetry collection There Are Still Woods (June Road Press, 2022), which won a gold Nautilus Book Award and was a finalist for a National Indie Excellence Award. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Narrative, Linebreak, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Adroit Journal, and other journals, and in The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry and Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College and lives in Oak Park, Illinois, outside Chicago. https://hilaratzabi.com

Darla Himeles (they/them) is a Philadelphia-based poet and assistant teaching professor at Widener University. They are the author of the chapbook Flesh Enough and the full-length poetry collection Cleave (Get Fresh Books). A 2026–2028 Boyds Mills Storyteller Fellow, Darla has also been awarded a Whole Novel Scholarship for Jewish Writers from Boyds Mills, and their poems and essays have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. They hold an AB in English from Bryn Mawr College, an MFA in poetry and poetry in translation from Drew University, and a PhD in American literature from Temple University.

Deborah Leipziger is an author, poet, and advisor on sustainability. Born in Brazil, Deborah’s poems have been published in ten countries in such journals as Salamander, Pensive, and The Bombay Literary Review. Her second poetry collection, Tell Me, is available from Lily Poetry Review Books. Deborah was selected by Brandeis University for a Jews of the Americas Fellowship (2025–2026). She is the author of several books on human rights and sustainability. Deborah developed The Lexicon of Change, which shares the language that we need for social and ecological transformation. Her work appears in numerous anthologies including The Nature of Our Times and Tree Lines. She is inspired by forests and rivers.

Join presenters Shauna Potocky, Director of the Seward Poetry Festival and Ian Ramsey, Director of the Kauffmann Program for Environmental Writing—experienced educators and poets whose work pulls together the power of art, the insight of science, and connections to place—as they provide an array of approaches that can lead to action and stewardship. Learn how to transform learning, empower voice, and create meaningful opportunities for change by translating scientific data into emotion and storytelling.  This session will give attendees resources, field-tested advice, and a vision of what strong outcomes can look like in their own communities or work.

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Shauna Potocky is the author of Sea Smoke, Spindrift and Other Spells (2025) and Yosemite Dawning: Poems of the Sierra Nevada (2023), published by Cirque Press. Her work appears in the newly published Alaska Literary Field Guide (2026), Writing Through the Apocalypse (2023), Seward Unleashed Water and Wonder (2023), Beyond Words International Literary Journal, Alpinist Magazine, Cirque Journal, and other literary publications. Shauna established the Seward Poetry Festival, held annually in Seward, Alaska. Shauna has extensive experience as an environmental educator, connecting science, public lands and poetry to stewardship. Her work has been featured in exhibits and events throughout Alaska.www.SeaSmokeArts.com

Ian Ramsey is the author of Hackable Animal (Wayfarer Books), finalist for the Prism Climate Prize. His writing has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and featured inTerrain.org, Orion, High Desert Journal, and other publications, as well as in collections like The Gift of Animals, Writing for Peace, and Maine Voices. Ian is the founding director of the Kauffmann Program for Environmental Writing and Wilderness Exploration. He frequently collaborates with climate scientists to communicate their research and findings to non-scientists. Ian is editing, along with Elizabeth Bradfield and Samaa Abdurraqib, a field guide to the Gulf of Maine that is forthcoming from Storey Press in 2027.www.ianramsey.net

After a brief overview of overlapping and sometimes conflicting views on the use of figurative language in addressing illness and the body, we will use examples from poetry to examine how metaphors might inform our understanding of being in a body (our own or/and the planet’s) and also invite inquiry into the ethical stakes and potential dangers of metaphorical language.

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Mihaela Moscaliuc is the author of four poetry collections, including Heartmoor (Alice James Books, 2026), a translator (from Romanian) and scholar of immigration literature, and a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow. She is a professor at Monmouth University, where she directs the M.A. program in English and teaches literature, creative writing, and courses on illness in literature for students in healthcare and nursing.mmoscaliuc.com

Liza Katz Duncan is the author of Given (Autumn House Press, 2023), which received the Autumn House Press Rising Writer Award and the Laurel Prize for Best International First Collection, and Drought/Diagnosis (Southword Editions, 2025), which received the Fool for Poetry International Chapbook Prize. In 2025 she was the Celia and Wally Gilbert Artist-in-Residence at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.lizakatzduncanpoet.com

From pen and paper to pavement and rain —our poetry follows the water cycle. Inspired by the Cuyahoga River, this session traces a thread from the river fire that helped start the Environmental Protection Agency to River Stanzas, highlighting a collaborative project that weaves together poetry, community, education, and the environment. Led by Kent State University with campus and community partners, the presentation is followed by a generative workshop where participants explore expressive typography and rain-activated visual poetry in public spaces, guided by previous participants of the project — former and current students of the MFA in Visual Communication Design at KSU — Jeremiah Nordholt and Serena Fantozzi.

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Leah Graham is an environmental educator, artist, and the Sustainability Coordinator in the Office of Sustainability at Kent State University. She holds a Master of Science in Environmental Studies from Ohio University, a Bachelor of Science in Environmental Biology from the University of Mount Union (formerly Mount Union College) and a graduate certificate in Scientific Illustration from the University of Washington. She taught Sea Turtle Studies and Marine Mammal Studies to college and high school students on study-abroad programs prior to joining the Office of Sustainability at Kent State University in 2013. Her artwork appears on book covers for both Cornerstone Press and Blue Cubicle Press. Her poetry has been published in Light Enters the Grove: Exploring Cuyahoga Valley National Park Through Poetry.

Aoife Mooney is an Irish textile artist, typo/graphic designer, and an Associate Professor in the School of Visual Communication Design at Kent State University in Ohio, USA. She holds an MFA in Studio Art (Textiles) from the School of Art at Kent State University, a Masters in Typeface Design from the University of Reading, and a Bachelors in Visual Communication from Dublin Institute of Technology (now TU Dublin). Before joining the faculty at Kent State in 2014, she worked as a typeface designer at the Hoefler & Frere-Jones type foundry in New York. Alongside her teaching, she maintains practices as textile artist, typeface designer and typographer. She is a member and regional coordinator of the ISTD North America Annual Student Assessment Scheme. She regularly presents on her research at conferences nationally and internationally.

Jeremiah Nordholt graduated from Kent State University with his Master’s of Visual Communication Design in 2024. Currently, he works as the Graphic Designer of Annual Giving at Case Western Reserve University and teaches design at Youngstown State. Actively participating in the design community, Jeremiah volunteers for AIGA Cleveland, has been a judge for the ISTD, and continues to present his research at conferences such as MODE and ICON. 

In this seminar, Joanna Solfrian, poet and frequent math tutor, will lead participants in close readings of poets such as Emily Dickinson, Kimberly Jae, Wallace Stevens, and Yehuda Amichai, whose poems use mathematical concepts to illuminate aspects of the human condition. Through studying poems that include both simple concepts (addition, line length) and conceptually lofty ones (the golden ratio, infinity, fractals), we’ll consider how factual knowledge can function as generative poem material. Included will be math-related prompts, adaptable to other branches of science, for use in our own work or our students’. Math-phobes, math-lovers, and those in between are welcome!

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Joanna Solfrian’s first book, Visible Heavens, was chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye for the 2009 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize, a national first book award. Her second collection, The Mud Room, was published by MadHat Press, followed by the chapbook The Second Perfect Number by Finishing Line Press. In 2024 Beltway Editions published the collection Temporary Beast. Her poems have appeared in The Harvard Review, Boulevard, Rattle, Margie, The Southern Review, Salamander, Pleiades, Image, and elsewhere. She is a MacDowell Fellow and a six-time Pushcart nominee. Joanna lives and works in New York City.www.joannasolfrian.com

This hybrid presentation and generative workshop invites participants to expand writing as both a personal and communal practice. Grounded in The Good Listening Project (TGLP) ideology, the session introduces listening as a creative and humanistic act, where Listener Poets transform lived experiences into personalized poems. Alongside this, participants will explore the 55-word story, a brief narrative form that distills meaningful moments through careful attention and reflection. By pairing these approaches, the session highlights how listening can be transformed into narrative. Participants will engage with examples and practice these methods, leaving with tools for deep listening, creative expression, and empathetic writing. 

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Brook Wyers, MS, is a graduate of Kent State University, class of 2021. She graduated with a degree in English and Creative Writing and was a former intern at the Wick Poetry Center. She then went on to receive her full master’s in publishing from Pace University in 2023. She currently works as a Writing Specialist at the Northeast Ohio Medical University (NEOMED) Writing Center, serves as faculty teaching in the M4 Capstone curriculum, and serves as a reflective practice mentor for M1s-M4s. Most recently, she has become a Certified Listener Poet through The Good Listening Project (TGLP), part of cohort 12.

Kevin Dieter, M.D., FAAHPM, HMDC, is a 1985 graduate of Northeastern Ohio Medical University (NEOMED) and a Clinical Associate Professor of Family Medicine at NEOMED. After a 35-year career in hospice and palliative care medicine, he retired from full-time clinical practice in 2023 and now continues to teach and practice part-time as Associate Medical Director of Hospice of the Western Reserve in Cleveland, Ohio. He helped develop a nationally recognized palliative care curriculum featuring a “Hospice Patient as Teacher” experience. He is a Certified Listener Poet with The Good Listening Project (TGLP), cohort 11.

What happens when elementary students are invited to observe the natural world not just as scientists, but as poets? This breakout session showcases a collaboration between a teacher and an environmental scientist from Kent State University. Together, they designed a series of experiences that encouraged young writers in an after school writer’s club to engage deeply with scientific concepts through poetry. Participants will hear directly from the teacher, the scientist, and the young writers themselves. Students will share original poems inspired by their observations of the natural world. These pieces reflect both scientific understanding and personal connection, demonstrating how poetry can serve as a powerful tool for meaning-making in scientific learning.

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Susan Louis is a 4th grade teacher at Holden Elementary School in Kent, Ohio. She is the advisor to the Holden Writer’s Club. 

Lauren Kinsman-Costello, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in the Biological Sciences Department at Kent State University who also Co-Directs Kent State’s Center for Ecology and Natural Resource Sustainability and leads the H2Ohio Wetland Monitoring Program. Her work explores nutrient cycling in hydrologically variable aquatic ecosystems, including urban wetlands, restored agricultural wetlands, Great Lakes coastal marshes, and arctic peatlands.

Wick and Water Science is a collaboration between the Wick Poetry Center and the Kinsman-Costello Nutrient Biogeochemistry Lab, both of which are part of Kent State University. We will share reflections on, lessons learned from, and advice for facilitating reciprocal science-poetry partnerships among individuals and groups. A longstanding mutual curiosity and friendship between these two groups crystalized in the fall semester of 2025 when Wick poets took a field trip with the graduate students of the Nutrient Biogeochemistry Lab to learn about water science and data collection, and later when the scientists took a field trip to the Wick Poetry Center to learn about and write poetry. After this initial exchange, Wick, as represented by Charlie Malone (not presenting) and Julia Cilano, and the Nutrient Biogeochemistry Lab, as represented by Dr. Lauren Kinsman-Costello and Siena Larrick, recommitted themselves to the mission of interdisciplinary collaboration, learning, and attention to the natural world. In the spring semester of 2026, the Wick and Water Science collaboration manifested itself as pairs or small groups of poets and scientists meeting up throughout the semester on their own before regathering at the semester’s end to reflect, and the project may very well take on different structures in months, semesters, and years to come. In our presentation, we will introduce our year’s worth of work and reflect on what we’ve learned thus far. We will share testimonies from our participating poets and scientists, as well as poems, graphs and or infographics made by our participants, to reflect on our experience as both participants and organizers for this project. We will begin our time with an ice-breaking creative exercise in which we encourage our attendees to respond poetically and scientifically to a paired data graph and image generated by our scientist-poets, and we will end with time for questions.

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Lauren Kinsman-Costello, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in the Biological Sciences Department at Kent State University who also Co-Directs Kent State’s Center for Ecology and Natural Resource Sustainability and leads the H2Ohio Wetland Monitoring Program. Her work explores nutrient cycling in hydrologically variable aquatic ecosystems, including urban wetlands, restored agricultural wetlands, Great Lakes coastal marshes, and arctic peatlands.

Siena Larrick is a master’s student in biology at Bridgewater State University and graduate mentor on the HERITOR Project, an international research collaboration focused on marine ecosystem science and community outreach in Cape Verde. Raised in Ohio and now based in Massachusetts, her academic and professional experience spans lakes, streams, wetlands, and coastal marine environments, with a throughline of human-environment interactions. Her work has included engagement with participatory science and reflects a broader interest in how communities shape and understand ecological systems. Siena possesses a lifelong love of poetry, which she endeavors to bring into dialogue with her scientific work.

Julia Cilano is a poetry student in the Northeast Ohio MFA program. She is a co-editor of CrayfishMag and a graduate fellow at the Wick Poetry Center of Kent State University. Her poetry has been published in Moss Puppy Magazine and Ashbelt, as well as neosolarzine (forthcoming) and elsewhere. Originally from Western New York, Julia is curious about hybrid forms in poetry and art, tradition and experimentation, the natural world, and the Great Lakes that define her home ecosystem(s).

Three writers who have served as an artist-in-residence in the National Park System will share their experiences and work generated from their residencies. These opportunities invite writers to connect with the land and flora and fauna, and they create a vital interaction with park visitors to explore the creative process, hopefully providing the visitors a chance for a more meaningful relationship to the natural world. The panelists will offer suggestions for interested writers to both help them prepare to apply for a residency and to ready themselves once a residency is secured. 

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Traci Brimhall is a university distinguished professor of creative writing at Kansas State University, as well as the 2025 Poet-in-Residence at the Guggenheim. She is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Love Prodigal. Her nonfiction debut, The Grief Artist, will be published by Sarabande Books in 2026. She served as an Artist-in-Residence at Bighorn Canyon through the National Parks Service. She is the current poet laureate of Kansas, where her initiatives have centered on uniting the state’s agricultural roots with the literary arts.

Lauren Camp is the author of nine poetry collections, most recently Is Is Enough and In Old Sky, which grew out of her experience as Astronomer-in-Residence at Grand Canyon National Park. As New Mexico Poet Laureate (2022–25), Camp created the New Mexico Epic Poem Project, a community-centered, crowd-sourced initiative designed to help people in rural and arts-underserved communities express themselves. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and Black Earth Institute and has been awarded a Dorset Prize and a New Mexico Book Award.

Jason Gray is the author of the poetry collections Radiation King and Photographing Eden, and the chapbooks, Adam & Eve Go to the Zoo, How to Paint the Savior Dead, and the brand-new Before the Roses Dishevel. He hosts the podcast Drunk as a Poet on Payday, which has featured Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winners, and also people who have not won those awards. In 2023, he was an artist-in-residence at Zion National Park.

Poets and scientists work at the edge of human knowledge, pressing toward mystery. In this session guided by two poets and a scientist, we will consider ways to integrate multiple methods of learning and observation in order to deepen practice and sharpen storytelling for the good of the living world.

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Michael Kleber-Diggs is a poet, essayist, literary critic, and arts educator based in St. Paul, Minnesota. He is the author of Worldly Things, which won the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize and was published by Milkweed Editions in 2021. His essay, “There Was a Tremendous Softness,” appears in A Darker Wilderness: Black Nature Writing from Soil to Stars, edited by Erin Sharkey (Milkweed Editions, 2023). His work appears in numerous journals and anthologies. Michael teaches creative writing through the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop and at universities in the Twin Cities.

Rick Lindroth (PhD) is a Distinguished Achievement Professor of Ecology (Emeritus) and former research dean at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is currently a Distinguished Fellow of the Lumen Center (Madison, WI). Rick is a Fulbright Fellow and an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Ecological Society of America, and the Entomological Society of America. Funded by the National Science Foundation and other agencies, Rick has authored/co-authored several hundred scientific articles. He has served as editor for multiple science journals and on advisory committees for NSF, USDA, the Pew Foundation, and national/international research institutes.

Poet Krissy Kludt is the founder and executive director of Writing the Wild. Her debut poetry collection I Could Walk Forever and Know So Little released March 5, 2026 from Green Writers Press. Her work appears in anthologies The Nature of Our Times (Paloma Press 2025), Taking Liberties (Cutthroat 2025), and Stories from the Trail (Wayfarer Books 2024), and in other publications, includingTerrain.org, The Wildness We Tend, and Humana Obscura. She lives in the Driftless region of southwestern Wisconsin.

How do we reckon with water? Essential to life, defiant of geopolitical boundaries, full of beings whose lives are filled with queer possibilities, water holds, carries, challenges, sustains, and threatens us. In this panel three water-writers will share how the fluidities and ecologies of water influences our work. We will dive into the connective possibilities water has always provided as a travel-way, the dangers now floating around us, and the mysteries that draw humans to seek what thrums beneath water’s reflective and defiant surface—as well as the beautiful potential of poetry to illuminate and make vivid the unseen.

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Poet/naturalist Elizabeth Bradfield is author of five collections, most recently SOFAR: Poems. She is also co-creator of Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry, winner of a Pacific Northwest Book Award among other honors. A former Stegner Fellow, winner of the Audre Lorde Prize in Lesbian Poetry, and Editor of Broadsided, Liz lives on Cape Cod where she works as a marine educator, assists with field work on seals and whales, and directs the Poetry Concentration for the low-residency MFA at Western Colorado University. www.ebradfield.com

Michael Kleber-Diggs is a poet, essayist, literary critic, and arts educator based in St. Paul, Minnesota. He is the author of Worldly Things, which won the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize and was published by Milkweed Editions in 2021. He is near completion on a memoir called My Weight in Water; it explores his lived experience as a large-bodied Black swimmer. His work appears in numerous journals and anthologies. Michael teaches creative writing through the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop and at universities in the Twin Cities. michaelkleberdiggs.com

신 선 영 Sun Yung Shin is an award-winning poet, essayist, and children’s book author. She is the editor of three anthologies, and the author of five poetry collections: including Six Tones of Water, co-written with Vi Khi Nao, and four books published by Coffee House Press, including The Wet Hex. Her memoir on immigration is forthcoming in July; and she is the author of three children’s books. She’s currently working on a book about watersheds and a book of Asian American history. Shin is a current McKnight Foundation Fellow in Creative Nonfiction and is a recent MacDowell Fellow. sunyungshin.com