Writer/Artist in residence as part of the Long-Term Environmental Reflection project at Wofford College’s Goodall Environmental Studies Center, responding to one (or more) of six designated sites with ecological, historical, and cultural significance located in the former cotton mill town of Glendale, South Carolina.
Megan Kaminski | University of Kansas
Aubrey Streit Krug | The Land Institute
In this pre-conference workshop, we’ll discuss and generate ideas for publicly-engaged environmental humanities projects and practices that feature plant care.
Engaged Reading | Time is a Mother, by Ocean Vuong
3:30pm Thursday, October 31 – Hall Center for the Humanities
Healthy democracy fosters an exchange of ideas across experiences and knowledge. One way to offer a platform for this is to root discussion in shared reading and collaborative understanding. Engaged Reading is offered to promote learning and inquiry across populations at the University, through common texts. Inspired by the expansive reach of the KU Reads / Common Book program, and curated with goals of generous and generative conversation, this series will feature excerpts and texts presented with discussion stewards.
‘Time is a Mother,’ by Ocean Vuong
Discussion led by Akiko Takeyama (Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies/Center for East Asian Studies) and Megan Kaminski (English/Environmental Studies). It is not necessary to have attended the September 26 event with Ocean Vuong, hosted by The Commons.
Supported by the Hall Center for the Humanities, KU Libraries, the Spencer Museum of Art, the Institute for Policy & Social Research, and The Commons
new material books at united colors gallery
in celebration of SK Reed's exhibition The Unreal
poetry reading featuring: Bob Sykora, Hyejung Kook, Jordan Stempleman, and Megan Kaminski
Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics 2024 Fall Symposium: Disability Poetics
Naropa University
12:00 PM - 2:30 PM | Performance & Ritual Poetics Panel
Location: Nalanda Event Center, Nalanda Campus, Naropa University
w/ Funto Omojola, Megan Kaminski & Dot Devota
7:00 PM - 9:00 PM | Disability Poetics & Justice Reading
Location: Nalanda Event Center, Nalanda Campus, Naropa University
w/ Funto Omojola, Megan Kaminski, Dot Devota
What does it mean to evade wide-spread agricultural cultivation? What does it mean to see plants as collaborators and to recognize the agency of non-human beings? This project is grounded in listening to plants, looking to them, and thinking with their call to place. Collaborating with the non-human co-inhabitants of Douglas County open space containing remnant prairie, with a special focus on native plants, Megan shares interactive, deep listening prompts, poems, and photographs geared toward opening our hearts towards sharing wonder and reciprocal love and joy with plants and other non-human co-inhabitants.
Project funded by: an Showcasing Open Space through Accessible Adventure (SOSAA) grant, funding from the Douglas County Heritage Conservation Council and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded Stories for All project at the University of Kansas’s Hall Center for the Humanities
Join Lawrence Transit and poet and professor Megan Kaminski in our kickoff for Lawrence Transit’s second annual Poet Laureate program, a Summer Ride and Write. Registration is capped at 25 attendees. To register email info@lawrencetransit.org.
We will travel through Lawrence via Route 8 on one of Lawrence Transit’s new electric buses and find inspiration together in the sights, sounds, and connections we make as we traverse the city making our way to Fields & Ivy. At the brewery, we’ll be guided by prompts to help us to see ourselves and our everyday lives through fresh eyes.
We will write together and have opportunities to share our words. Participants will leave with a poem and prompts to inspire ongoing writing, as well as an invitation to submit poems for the Lawrence Transit Poet Laureate program.
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For this year’s Poet Laureate program, we encourage poems around themes of community, transportation, and home. We welcome everyone in honoring the movements, places, and feelings that tell the stories of our days. We invite participants to find sources of inspiration in the theme, prompts, or to join us in our workshop at Fields & Ivy on August 30th to write and share a poem.
The Lawrence Transit Poet Laureate program offers the chance for local poets of any age and their poems to be featured on Lawrence Transit electric buses. To be considered, submit a transit-related poem by September 30, 2024.
Connecting with the natural world can provide a wellspring of knowledge and inspiration, enabling us to (re)discover strategies for living in the world, to grieve and heal after loss, and realign our thinking toward kinship, community, and sustainability. This beginner-friendly nature and poetry walk will be oriented to connecting with the more-than-human world through literature in the environmental humanities. By the words of poets, writers, and our own senses, this hike will engage with diverse habitats throughout Kansas to help participants listen to the often-unseen wisdom around us.
Poetry Reading w. Kristi Maxwell. Details TBA.
Featured Reader: Megan Kaminski. Open Mic begins at 6:30pm.
In this writing workshop led by poet Megan Kaminski, we’ll engage in deep listening practices to tap into the knowledge shared by the world around us and the often-unheard wisdom already present in our own bodies and spirits. As spring brings us longer days and tender green shoots of new life, we’ll listen to the growth occurring all around us to help us clear out the clutter of last year’s dormant period and make way for new writing. If weather permits, we may go outside, so please dress accordingly. This class is part of the Written Storytelling Certificate Programs as a Writing Elective. Please note this program will take place in person in the Story Center Historic Home. Please make sure to register the number of guests in your party. Registration is required and space is limited.
Climate Feminism and Other Ways of Leading around Climate Change
-How might we describe Climate Feminism? What is it not?
-How do these principles and practices show up in your work?
-What kinds of possibilities might feminist-led efforts make space for?
-How are youth-led efforts embracing feminist principles?
-What other forms of knowledge should enter the conversation?
In this workshop, a group of faculty and staff at the forefront of inclusive practices at KU will share their innovations and approaches to disability and neurodivergence inclusion and trauma-informed pedagogy. With Dea Follmer, CTE/Psychology; Megan Kaminski, English/Environmental Studies; and RB Perelmutter, Jewish Studies/ Slavic & Eurasian Languages & Literatures.
This interdisciplinary workshop aims to bring together a small collection of scholars and artists working on plant animacies broadly defined—from plants as agential beings that enact material change in the world to the ways that plants discursively inspire conceptions of what it means to be alive or lively.
Camille T. Dungy is the author of four collections of poetry and the author of the essay collections Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden (Simon & Schuster, 2023) and Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood and History (W.W. Norton, 2017). Dungy has also edited anthologies including Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry. A 2019 Guggenheim Fellow, her honors include NEA Fellowships in poetry (2003) and prose (2018), an American Book Award, two NAACP Image Award nominations, and two Hurston/Wright Legacy Award nominations. She is University Distinguished Professor at Colorado State University.
Camille will be hosted in conversation with Imani Wadud, PhD Candidate in American Studies & Megan Kaminski, Professor of English and Environmental Studies.
Register at https://bit.ly/DungyKU
Featuring
Vidhu Aggarwal, Megan Kaminski, Ashwini Bhasi, Teresa Carmody, Angela Peñaredondo, Bishakh Som, Olivia Muenz, Ronaldo Wilson, Ginger Ko, Emily Brandt, Jameelah Lang, and Petra Kuppers
Offsite reading featuring:
Michele Battiste, Teresa Carmody, Megan Kaminski, Kristen Nelson, and Hoa Nguyen
AWP Panel
w/ Michele Battiste, Teresa Carmody, Megan Kaminski, Kristen Nelson, and Hoa Nguyen
Divination and writing are both processes that draw from archives of knowledge, but divination opens us up to sources often difficult to access: ancestral, somatic, elemental, natural, spiritual, unconscious, silenced. By accessing these sources to inform and guide writing, our writing, in turn, generates meaning and connections that alter the archives in structure, content, and accessibility. We will explore how divination creates new paths to hidden ways of knowing and writing.
The 11th Annual Rock And Roll Reading bill is set, and it's going to awesome. We have a lot of readers (We have to this year! It's our home field in KC, and lots of folks are coming home), but each reader only has 3 minutes or less (for real), and we'll break things up with an intermission. As always, all pieces will be about or inspired by Rock and Roll or any of its precursors or offshoots.
Personal stories about the places of midwest literature Register Here →
Join us to celebrate the release of Wild Words, from Humanities Kansas! Stroll through the wetlands and prairies with restoration ecologist and Executive Director of Native Lands Restoration Collaborative, Courtney Masterson and Megan Kaminski, poet, editor of Wild Words, and Professor of Creative Writing and Environmental Studies at the University of Kansas. We’ll learn about the flowers that dot the fall landscape and interact with poems in the collection as guides to fostering relationships of care and reciprocity. Free copies of Wild Words will be available first-come-first-served.
We'll meet at the Roth Trailhead parking lot at 9:30AM, and venture on a walk through the woods. Our walk will finish at the Rockefeller Prairie. If you're interested in an ADA accessible option, you can meet the group at the Rockefeller Prairie trail deck (there is a parking lot and paved trail leading to the prairie and the deck/seating area) at roughly 10AM. Please email Ruby if you have questions. For more information about the KU Field Station (and maps) visit: https://biosurvey.ku.edu/field...
Find more information about Wild Words here: https://www.humanitieskansas.o...
Connecting with the natural world can provide a wellspring of knowledge and inspiration, enabling us to (re)discover strategies for living in the world, to grieve and heal after loss, and realign our thinking toward kinship, community, and sustainability. This beginner-friendly nature and poetry walk will be oriented to connecting with the more-than-human world through literature in the environmental humanities. By the words of poets, writers, and our own senses, this hike will engage with diverse habitats throughout Kansas to help participants listen to the often-unseen wisdom around us.
Join poet Megan Kaminski and botanist Courtney Masterson for a field hike at the Baker Wetlands using HK’s Wild Words as a guide. Poets have long reflected on the wild beauty of plants to give meaning to self and home. In what ways do these poems look to the Kansas prairie to define our place in the world? Water, sunscreen, and bug spray are recommended for this outdoor activity.
Wild Words has been made possible with support from the Elizabeth Schultz Environmental Fund at the Douglas County Community Foundation, Kansas Tourism, Native Lands LLC, and the Sunflower Foundation.
For more information contact:
Bluebird Taylor-McKown,
Bluebird.Taylor-McKown@bakeru.edu
Humanities Kansas invites readers to engage with native plants through Wild Words, a chapbook of poems and original illustrations that honor the Kansas prairie, from the iconic sunflower and big bluestem to the unexpected antelope milkweed. Panel features Megan Kaminski, Wild Words editor + featured poets. Moderator: HK Director of Grants & Outreach, Leslie VonHolten.
Megan Kaminski | Wed | Sept 13 | 7:30 pm | Weber Fine Arts Gallery
Megan Kaminski is a poet and essayist—and the author of three books of poetry, most recently Gentlewomen (Noemi Press, 2020). She’s also the author of Prairie Divination (Sunseen Books, 2022), a book of illustrated essays and oracle deck in collaboration with artist L. Ann Wheeler, and Quietly Between (A Viewing Space, 2022), a co-authored collection of poetry and photography. Her current book project, In Bloom, explores inter-generational healing, interspecies collaboration, transcorporeal embodiments, and chronic illness via a queer ecopoetics. Her writing and teaching focus on helping people connect to their own ecosystems as a source of knowledge and inspiration for strategies to live in their world, to grieve and heal after loss, and to re-align thinking towards kinship, community, and sustainability. She is Professor in English and Environmental Studies at the University of Kansas.
Connecting with the natural world can provide a wellspring of knowledge and inspiration, enabling us to (re)discover strategies for living in the world, to grieve and heal after loss, and realign our thinking toward kinship, community, and sustainability. This beginner-friendly nature and poetry walk will be oriented to connecting with the more-than-human world through literature in the environmental humanities. By the words of poets, writers, and our own senses, this hike will engage with diverse habitats throughout Kansas to help participants listen to the often-unseen wisdom around us.
Historiae, the 2018 collection from contemporary Italian poet Antonella Anedda, is available for the first time to English readers thanks to a stunning translation by Susan Stewart and Patrizio Ceccagnoli. On September 4 at 7 p.m., the Raven will be joined by Ceccagnoli for a bilingual reading of Anedda’s work and a discussion of the art of translation. Join us as Ceccagnoli explores the work of translating Historiae in conversation with classicist and translator Stanley Lombardo and poet Megan Kaminski.
Conversation with host Jenny Inzerillo and the Land Institute’s Aubrey Streit Krug about Wild Words on High Plains Morning.
https://www.hppr.org
