Starting in October 2016, the UA Poetry Center features eight world-class poets as they address what overlaps, contradictions, mutual challenges, and confluences the categories of Climate Change & Poetry share with each other; in a series of investigative readings, we hope to offer some answers, some questions, and some new ways of thinking. 

In this second installment of readings built around a common question, we wonder: what role does poetry have in envisioning, articulating, or challenging our ecological present? What role does poetry have in anticipating, shaping--or even creating--our future? 

These presentations, part reading and part craft talk, will take place at the UA Poetry Center beginning this fall as part of the 2016-17 Reading and Lecture Series, and we are happy to be partnering with our co-sponsor, UA Science, on the Climate Change & Poetry events. We look forward to exploring these complex concerns through a poetic lens and thinking about the ways literature and science collide. 

All readings take place at the UA Poetry Center at 7pm:

10/6/16     Robert Hass + Brenda Hillman

10/13/16     Aracelis Girmay

11/17/16    Camille Dungy

12/1/16      Joy Harjo

1/19/17      Ross Gay

1/26/17      Brian Teare

2/16/17      Alison Hawthorne Deming

Several of the readings will feature Climate Talks beforehand from 6:30-6:50, featuring scientists with environmental expertise. If you arrive during the talk, we ask that you wait outside prior to the accompanying reading as our doors will be closed. These Climate Talks are:

10/13/16     Diana Liverman 

11/17/16      Gregg Garfin

12/1/16       Karletta Chief

We are grateful for support for this series from the following groups at the University of Arizona: the Agnese Nelms Haury Program in Environment and Social Justice, the College of Science, the Confluencenter for Creative Inquiry, the Institute of the Environment, and Africana Studies.