W&L Hosts Joint Reading and Talk on Ecological Approaches to Poetry

By Julie Cline
March 24, 2017

A joint reading and talk on ecological approaches to poetry with Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street will be held at Washington and Lee University on April 3 at 5 p.m. in Northen Auditorium, Leyburn Library.

The event is free and open to the public. Books will be for sale and refreshments will be offered. The event is co-sponsored by Environmental Studies at W&L and the dean of the college.

Fisher-Wirth’s fourth book of poems is “Dream Cabinet” (2012). With Street, she coedited “Ecopoetry Anthology” (2013), which is a comprehensive collection of American poetry about nature and the environment, stressing the relationship of people to the other-than-human world.

Her current project is a collaborative poetry and photography manuscript called “Mississippi” with the acclaimed photographer Maude Schuyler Clay (2017).

Fisher-Wirth, who teaches and directs the Environmental Studies Program at the University of Mississippi, has been awarded residencies at The Mesa Refuge; Djerassi Resident Artists Program; Hedgebrook; and CAMAC/Centre d’Art in Marnay, France.

She is a Fellow 2015-2018 of the Black Earth Institute, the recipient of a senior Fulbright to Switzerland and a Fulbright Distinguished Chair award to Sweden and past president of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment.

Street is the author of “Pigment and Fume” (2014) and co-editor with Fisher-Wirth of the Ecopoetry Anthology (2013).

She has been the recipient of poetry prizes from The Greensboro Review; the Dana Awards; the Southern Women Writers Conference; Isotope: A Journal of Literary Nature and Science Writing; and Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built and Natural Environments.

Street’s work has been published in the Colorado Review, Poecology, Poetry Daily, Hawk and Handsaw, Gargoyle and Shenandoah. Her work has been supported by fellowships from the Virginia Commission for the Arts, the Artist House at St. Mary’s College in Maryland and the Hambidge Center for the Arts and Sciences, where Street was the Garland Distinguished Fellow.

She is an associate professor of English and directs the Creative Writing Program at Randolph College in Lynchburg, Virginia.