University of Helsinki
ECO-POETICS FOR THE MORE-THAN-HUMAN WORLD: A READING AND CONVERSATION
17 NOVEMBER (WEDNESDAY) 18:00-19:30 (HELSINKI) 11:00-12:30 (NEW YORK)
For ZOOM Link please register HERE by November 16. You will receive the ZOOM link an hour before the event.
This session features contributors to the recent anthology of poetry and commentary, Poetics for the More-Than-Human World. Six scholar/poets/artists will read from recent poetic works representing a diversity of voice, place, and connections between human and non-human communities at this time of imminent danger pressing for change. There will be time for conversation. Featuring Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Joseph Bruchac, Cheryl J. Fish, Juan Carlos Galeano, Hanna Ellen Guttorm, and Mary Newell.
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge is the author of fourteen books of poetry, most recently, A Treatise on Stars (New Directions) and Hello, the Roses (New Directions), which has been translated into Swedish by Ana Jaderland. She received Bollingen Prize in 2021 and was short-listed for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. She has collaborated with artists in visual arts, theater, music and dance. She lives in northern New Mexico.
Joseph Bruchac is an enrolled member of the Nulhegan Abenaki Nation. Author of over 170 books in several genres, his poems, essays, and stories have appeared in hundreds of anthologies and magazines ranging from Akwesasne Notes and Parabola to the Paris Review and National Geographic. His books of poetry include: Ndakinna/Our Land, Nisnol Siboal/Two Rivers, and Four Directions, New and Recollected Poems.
Cheryl J. Fish is an environmental justice scholar, poet, and fiction writer. Her new book of poem and photographs, THE SAUNA IS FULL OF MAIDS, celebrates Finnish sauna culture, travel, and friendships. She has published essays on resistance to extractivism in Sápmi, focused on the work of Sami filmmakers and photographers. Fish has been a writer-in-residence at KulttuuriKauppila in Ii, Finland, and was Fulbright professor at University of Tampere. Her collection of poetry, Crater & Tower, addresses trauma, ecology, and aftermaths at Mount St. Helens Volcano and the World Trade Center since 9-11-01. She is professor of English at BMCC/City University of New York, and docent lecturer in the Dept. of Cultures at University of Helsinki.
Juan Carlos Galeano is a poet, essayist and filmmaker born in the Amazon region of Colombia. He has published several books of poetry and has translated the works of North American poets into Spanish. Over a decade of fieldwork on symbolic narratives of riverine and forest people in the Amazon basin resulted in his production of a comprehensive collection of storytelling (Folktales of the Amazon, ABC-CLIO, 2009) translated into several languages, the documentary film (The Trees Have a Mother, Films for the Humanities and Sciences, 2009), and most recently, last summer, El Río, 2018. His poetry inspired by Amazonian cosmologies and the modern world has been anthologized and published in international journals.
Hanna Ellen Guttorm, is widely interested in life and its possibilities on our planet. She is especially inspired by Indigenous ontologies, post theories, and nomadic, autoethnographic writing, with which she investigates–especially in the context of the Sámi society and her own roots–how we could do and write research in order to make a change towards a more ecological, social and cultural sustainability and solidarity possible. Currently she works as senior researcher in Indigenous Studies at the University of Helsinki, also affiliated to HELSUS (Helsinki Institute of Sustainability Studies).
Mary Newell authored the chapbooks TILT/ HOVER/ VEER (Codhill Press 2019) and Re-SURGE (Trainwreck Press 2021), poems in journals and anthologies, and essays including “When Poetry Rivers” (Interim journal). She is co-editor of Poetics for the More-than-Human-World: An Anthology of Poetry and Commentary and the forthcoming (2022) Routledge Companion to Ecopoetics.