Science is a practice of sustained attention into the unknown. Poetry is too. This generative writing session explores the reciprocal relationship between the two disciplines, specifically how the poem can carry scientific knowledge between specialist and nonspecialist, not by simplifying, but by transforming. Three poets whose work engages with geology, ecology, and evolutionary biology will each present a poem, offer a writing prompt drawn from its scientific terrain, and give attendees time to write. Attendees will leave with new poems in progress.

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Charlotte Pence served as Mobile, Alabama’s inaugural Poet Laureate and a 2024 Academy of American Poets laureate fellow. Her most recent collection, Code, received the 2020 Book of the Year award from the Alabama State Poetry Society and was selected as a must-read poetry collection by The Millions. Code explores the life cycle of birth and death through the lens of DNA itself. Her debut collection, Many Small Fires (Black Lawrence Press, 2015), winner of the silver award from Foreword Reviews, weaves personal experience with the physiological changes that enabled humans to form cities, communities, and households.

Tess Taylor is a poet, playwright, and cultural critic whose work explores place, memory, and cultural reckoning. Her five collections include Rift Zone (Boston Globe’s best books of 2020) and Work & Days (New York Times’s best poetry books of 2016). Her staged adaptation of Last West—investigating the life and documentary photography of Dorothea Lange—received a CoLABo fellowship from Carnegie Mellon and played to a sold out run at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art. A Fulbright Scholar at the Seamus Heaney Centre, she collaborated with the Getty Museum on the podcast Intimate Addresses, exploring artists’ letters and 20th-century art history. She served as on-air poetry reviewer for NPR’s All Things Considered for over a decade.

Marcela Sulak’s recent work includes The Fault; National Jewish Book Awards finalist, City of Sky Papers, and the lyric memoir Mouth Full of Seeds. She’s co-edited Family Resemblance: An Anthology and Exploration of 8 Hybrid Literary Genres. A translator from the Czech, French, and Hebrew, Sulak’s Twenty Girls to Envy Me. The Selected Poems of Orit Gidali was finalist for the 2017 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, and her forthcoming Music of the Wide Lane by Sharron Hass, received a 2019 NEA fellowship. Sulak edits The Ilanot Review and directs the Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing.