Megan Kaminski is a poet and Professor of Creative Writing and Environmental Studies at the University of Kansas. She is the author of three books of poetry, Gentlewomen (Noemi Press, 2020), Deep City (Noemi Press, 2015) and Desiring Map (Coconut Books, 2012) and two artists books, Prairie Divination (Sunseen Books, 2022), a book of illustrated essays and oracle deck, and Quietly Between (A Viewing Project. 2022), a co-authored collection of poetry and photography. Her place-based sound, poetry, and art installations have appeared at museums, public gardens, and libraries across the country, and her poetry and essays regularly appear in literary magazines and journals. Her social practice includes three edited volumes of nature poetry and art, as well as hundreds of community workshops, place-based poetry walks, and community readings, talks, and performances.
Her current book project, Blazing Star, explores the healing modalities of plants and the liberatory possibilities of radical tenderness through a poetics of care with and for the more-than-human world. The poems reimagine interspecies communication and nonhuman encounters through a speculative poetics of transcorporeal embodiments in “thick time.” Through listening and interspecies avuncular care, she develops individual relationships, conversing through hand and voice, water and soil, leaf and flower, breeze and song. This care blossoms into speculative permutations of the body and self through an exploration of trauma, healing, and the more-than-human relationships we are always already engaging in, visioning new possibilities for reciprocity and community.
She works at intersections of plant studies, somatics, and ceremony, and her work is informed by interdisciplinary research in social welfare, plant biology, theology, and philosophy, as well as previous work in the healing arts and at non-profit environmental organizations. Her writing and interdisciplinary research have been supported by Dumbarton Oaks at Harvard University, the Plant Animacies Workshop of Hixon-Riggs Program for Responsive Science at Harvey Mudd College, Poesia Europa, the Vashon Artist Residency, Arte Studio Ginestrelle, the Tallgrass Artist Residency, the Summer Forum for Inquiry + Exchange, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, the Hall Center for the Humanities, a Keeler Family Intra-University Professorship, and the Spencer Museum of Art. Her creative work and scholarship aim to undo the cultures of dominance and exploitation that have brought us to this current moment of ecological crisis and inequality.
“Under tree canopy” from Plant-Human Quarterly ‘s Summer Solstice Reading
