Join us for poetry and conversation about creative, research, and transformative practices. Featuring contemporary poets reading from their recent books and in dialogue with KU student writers and artists. In collaboration with this spring's graduate poetry seminar (ENGL 752) and the Global Grasslands CoLABorative's Encounter + Engagement workshop.

About Witch:

Poems merge queer ecopoetics with religious disposition, speaking through a pantheon of mythic figures―from Jesus to Aphrodite―to commune or contend with reality. What emerges is a cumulative awareness of being a physical, energetic body in a fractured world, attempting to heal some part of it while exploring and embracing the gray areas of identity and ambiguity.

Philip Matthews is a poet from eastern North Carolina. He is the author of Witch (Alice James Books, 2020) and Wig Heavier Than A Boot (Kris Graves Projects, 2019), a collaboration with photographer David Johnson. Anchored by site-specific meditation and performance, his practice of the past decade has investigated spiritual queer power, questions of home and ecological shift. He is curious about what happens next. 

Philip is the recipient of fellowships and residencies from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Peaked Hill Trust and Hemera Foundation. He has taught at Washington University in St. Louis and Kansas City Art Institute, and from 2013-16 he organized public programs at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, emphasizing artist-driven thinking, cross-disciplinary collaboration and community-directed action. He currently directs programs at Wormfarm Institute, a nonprofit in Sauk County, Wisconsin dedicated to integrating culture and agriculture across the rural-urban continuum.