The Kaplan Humanities Institute Memorializing Dialogue Series and the Poetry & Poetics Colloquium present:
Black Poetics and Environmental Memory: A Reading and Conversation featuring Ed Roberson and Tiana Clark

Modern environmentalism has often struggled to account for histories of racialized dispossession. However, many Black poets have taken up environmental concerns, as illustrated by the landmark anthology Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry. Environmental poetics continues to be a prominent theme in much contemporary Black poetry. For example, Tiana Clark’s recent collection I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood draws our attention to the predicament of Black poets facing a pastoral landscape whose image has been marred by the memory of bloodshed. “Black Poetics and Environmental Memory” will feature a reading and conversation between Tiana Clark and Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize-winner Ed Roberson. These celebrated contemporary Black poets will discuss their relationship to environmental thought as inflected through and/or contesting histories and memories of racialized violence. This event asks: Is it possible to find beauty in such landscapes knowing what has occurred there, and how might memorialization itself be an environmental act?

Thursday, October 31, 2019, 12:30-2pm in the Hagstrum Room (University Hall 201).

Free and open to the public. Lunch will be served. More information available here.

Co-sponsored by: African American Studies, American Cultures Colloquium, American Studies, Black Arts Initiative, Black Poetics Collective, Program in Critical Theory, Environmental Humanities Research Workshop, Environmental Policy and Culture, The Graduate School, History, Litowitz Creative Writing Graduate Program, Philosophy, and Religious Studies.