In Honor of Earth Day, 2022, it was wonderful to join four award-winning poets featured in Here: Poems for the Planet
In Honor of Earth Day, 2022, it was wonderful to join executive director, Sonnet Coggins, as well as Kwame Dawes, Tishani Doshi, Robert Hass, and Brenda Hillman, four award-winning poets featured in Here: Poems for the Planet (Copper Canyon Press, 2019), virtually in the Green Room Live of the Merwin Conservancy on Wednesday, April 27, 2022, and talk about the inspiration for the anthology and the role of eco poetry in this pivotal moment for our planet.
The Green Room LIVE: Poems for the Planet
Wednesday, April 27, 2022
2:00pm Hawaiʻi/ 5:00pm Pacific / 8:00pm Eastern
In honor of National Poetry Month, on Wednesday, April 27th, The Merwin Conservancy hosts a virtual poetry reading with Kwame Dawes, Tishani Doshi, Robert Hass, and Brenda Hillman, poets featured in the anthology Here: Poems for the Planet (Copper Canyon Press, 2019).
Here is "a call for hope and action," which galvanizes readers to address the realities of climate change and ecological peril head-on. Through the lens of poetry, this anthology looks at our fellow humans and animals, the beauty around us, and the problems we face, and asks for a renewed sense of courage, in place of the fear that so often leads to indifference and cynicism.
The bookʻs editor Elizabeth J. Coleman will also be present to share about the inspiration behind the book. Each poet will read a few selected poems and will participate in a Q&A with the online audience.
We hope you can join us! If you're unable to make the live broadcast, you can watch the replay as long as you've pre-registered. All registered guests will have the opportunity to purchase Here: Poems for the Planet at a 20% discount, thanks to our friends at Point Reyes Books.
ABOUT THE POETS:
Kwame Dawes has authored 36 books of poetry, fiction, criticism, and essays, including, most recently, Nebraska, Bivouac (Akashic Books, 2019), and City of Bones: A Testament (Northwestern, 2017). Speak from Here to There (Peepal Tree Press), co-written with Australian poet John Kinsella, appeared in 2016. He is Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner and Chancellor’s Professor of English at the University of Nebraska. He is also a faculty member in the Pacific MFA Program. He is Director of the African Poetry Book Fund and Artistic Director of the Calabash International Literary Festival. Dawes is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
Tishani Doshi publishes poetry, essays and fiction. Her most recent books are Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods, shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award, and a novel, Small Days and Nights (Norton), shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize and a New York Times Bestsellers Editor’s Choice. For fifteen years she worked as a dancer with the Chandralekha group in Madras, India. She is a visiting associate professor at New York University Abu Dhabi, and otherwise, lives in Tamil Nadu. A God at the Door, published by Copper Canyon Press, is her fourth full-length collection of poems, and was shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize in 2021.
Robert Hass is a poet, essayist, and translator. Winner of a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 2007, he was also twice awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award, once in poetry and once in criticism. The recipient of a MacArthur "genius" grant, he served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997. An active environmentalist, he is on the board of directors of the International River and is cofounder of the national environmental education project, River of Words, in which thousands of American school children participate every year. His books, full of the life of northern California, include several volumes of poetry: Field Guide, Praise, Human Wishes, Sun Under Wood, Time and Materials, The Apple Trees at Olema, and Summer Snow. He is cotranslator, with Czeslaw Milosz, of ten volumes of Milosz's poems, including The Collected Poems, Unattainable Earth, Provinces, Facing the River, and Road-side Dog. He has edited volumes of the work of the Swedish poet, Tomas Transtromer, Slovenian poet, Tomaz Salmun, and American poet, Robinson Jeffers. He has also published The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa.
Brenda Hillman is the author of ten collections of poetry: White Dress, Fortress, Death Tractates, Bright Existence, Loose Sugar, Cascadia, Pieces of Air in the Epic, Practical Water, for which she won the L.A. Times Book Award for Poetry, Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire, which received the 2014 Griffin Poetry Prize and the Northern California Book Award for Poetry; and her most recent Extra Hidden Life, Among the Days. In 2016 she was named Academy of American Poets Chancellor. Among other awards Hillman has received are the 2012 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, the 2005 William Carlos Williams Prize for poetry, and Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation.
ABOUT THE EDITOR:
Elizabeth Coleman, editor of Here: Poems for the Planet, is the author of The Fifth Generation and Proof, which was a finalist for the Brittingham and Pollack prizes. She has written two chapbooks, Let My Ears Be Open and The Saint of Lost Things, and translated into French the bilingual sonnet collection Pythagoras in Love/Pythagore, Amoureux. Coleman's poetry has appeared in numerous anthologies and journals. In addition, she is an attorney, mindfulness teacher, guitarist, and environmental activist.