Just in time for Earth Day, we’ll be celebrating eco-poetics as a mode of creative resistance. This reading and discussion will launch the Copper Canyon Press anthology HERE: Poems for the Planet, edited by Elizabeth J. Coleman. Featuring poets who write with urgency and hope about the natural world, the event is supported by three organizations that create a better and more just landscape for poets and poetry: Cave Canem, CantoMundo, and Kundiman.
Kimiko Hahn is the author of nine books of poetry, including The Artist’s Daughter (2002), The Narrow Road to the Interior (2006), Toxic Flora (2010), and Brain Fever (2014). Hahn is the winner of the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, the American Book Award, and the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. She has also been awarded fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Hahn teaches in the MFA program at Queens College. In 2016, she was elected president of the Poetry Society of America.
Francisco Aragón is the son of Nicaraguan immigrants. He is the author of two books: Puerta del Sol and Glow of Our Sweat, as well as editor of the anthology, The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry. His third book, After Rubén, is slated for publication in 2020. His Tongue a Swath of Sky, a chapbook, is due out in 2019. He’s been a featured poet at the Split This Rock Poetry Festival and the Dodge Poetry Festival. In 2017, he was a finalist for Split This Rock’s Freedom Plow Award for poetry and activism. A CantoMundo fellow and a member of the Macondo Writers’ workshop, he directs Letras Latinas, the literary initiative at the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies. For more information, visit franciscoaragon.net.
Elizabeth J. Coleman, the Q&A moderator for this event, is a poet, public-interest attorney, environmental activist, and teacher of mindfulness. She is the author of two poetry collections, The Fifth Generation (2016) and Proof (2014), which was a finalist for the University of Wisconsin Press’s Brittingham and Pollak prizes. She is also the author of two chapbooks. Her poems have been published in a number of journals, including Rattle and The Bellevue Literary Revue, and a number of anthologies. She is a vice president of the Poetry Society of America. A member of the New York, Georgia and D.C. Bars, and a past attorney and board chair at several nonprofit legal organization, Elizabeth runs a small environmental nonprofit. In Here, Elizabeth has brought together her love for poetry, for justice, and for our planet.
