The Broad Stage at Home's Red Hen Press Poetry Hour Presents 'The Poetics Of Climate Change'

The Broad Stage and esteemed LA-based publisher Red Hen Press continues season two of the Red Hen Press Poetry Hour with the online episode The Poetics of Climate Change on Thursday, August 27 at 6 pm PT.

Nature is all around us, but what is its true impact and influence on the creation of art? Join returning host Sandra Tsing Loh for a conversation on the environment's necessity for our artistic figures.

Panelists include poet/naturalist Elizabeth Bradfield, whose recent book Towards Antarctica offers a unique view of The Last Continent through photographs and prose, and science journalist/playwright Alanna Mitchell, whose play Sea Sick, tells the tale of her 13 oceanic journeys in 3 years to observe the vast chemical changes at the hand of man and why that matters (Sea Sick comes to The Edye at The Broad Stage in April 2021).

The Poetics of Climate Change will also feature readings by critically acclaimed poet Natalie Diaz, member of the Gila River Indian Tribe and born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California on the banks of the Colorado River; 2014 Los Angeles Poet Laureate Luis J. Rodriguez, founding editor of Tia Chucha Press and co-founder/president of Tia Chucha's Centro Cultural & Bookstore in the San Fernando Valley; and Poet Laureate of Utah Paisley Rekdal.

This second season of virtual programming brings together performing artists and poets to explore themes central to works featured in The Broad Stage's 2020/21 Season. Red Hen Press Poetry Hour is part of The Broad Stage at Home, original monthly programming via the online portal that will broadcast through December.

Elizabeth Bradfield is the author of the Once Removed, Approaching Ice, Interpretive Work and Toward Antarctica. Theorem, a collaboration with artist Antonia Contro, is forthcoming this fall. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Kenyon Review, and her honors include the Audre Lorde Prize and a Stegner Fellowship. Founder and editor-in-chief of Broadsided Press, she works as a naturalist/guide and teaches creative writing at Brandeis University. www.ebradfield.com

Natalie Diaz, Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe, was born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California on the banks of the Colorado River. Her first poetry collection, When My Brother Was an Aztec, was published by Copper Canyon Press and the recent Postcolonial Love Poem by Graywolf Press in 2020. She has received fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation, the Lannan Literary Foundation, and the Native Arts Council Foundation, and Princeton University and was awarded the Princeton Holmes National Poetry Prize. She is a member of the Board of Trustees for the United States Artists, where she is an alumnus of the Ford Fellowship. Diaz is Director of the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands and the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Arizona State University. She lives in Phoenix, Arizona.

Alanna Mitchell is an award-winning Canadian journalist and author who writes about science and social trends, specializing in investigative reporting. Her most recent full-length book, Sea Sick: The Global Ocean in Crisis, won the prestigious U.S.-based Grantham Prize for excellence in environmental journalism. Her e-book Invisible Plastic: What Happens When Your Garbage Ends Up in the Ocean was published by The Toronto Star in 2013. Mitchell also writes freelance magazine and newspaper articles, researches television documentaries and makes radio documentaries for CBC. She is a regular contributor to The New York Times science section, and to CBC's Quirks & Quarks, in addition to having a regular column in Canadian Wildlife Magazine.

Paisley Rekdal is currently serving as Poet Laureate of Utah. She is the author of a book of essays The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee: Observations on Not Fitting In, the memoir Intimate, as well as five books of poetry. For her work, she has received numerous fellowships, grants, and awards, including the 2019 Academy of American Poets' Poets Laureate Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, a Civitella Ranieri Residency, National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and 2009 and 2013 Pushcart Prizes; her writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, The New Republic, Tin House, the Best American Poetry Series, and on National Public Radio.

From 2014 to 2016, Luis J. Rodriguez served as the official Poet Laureate of Los Angeles. He is the author sixteen books in all genres, including the best-selling memoir, Always Running, La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A. and its sequel, It Calls You Back: An Odyssey though Love, Addiction, Revolutions and Healing. His most recent poetry book is Borrowed Bones from Curbstone Books/Northwestern University Press, and in 2020 Seven Stories Press released his first book of essays, From Our Land to Our Land: Essays, Journeys & Imaginings from a Native Xicanx Writer. Luis is the founding editor of Tia Chucha Press, now in its 30th year, and co-founder/president of Tia Chucha's Centro Cultural & Bookstore in the San Fernando Valley

Red Hen Press Poetry Hour continues with a deep dive into feminism in September. The Red Hen Press Poetry Hour has included readings from California Poet Laureate Dana Gioia, Richard Blanco, who was selected by President Obama as the fifth inaugural poet in U.S. history, and 2019 NAACP Image Poetry Awards nominee Allison Joseph, two-time winner of the PEN Literary Award for Children's Literature.

At livestream time, the broadcast is found on The Broad Stage website at thebroadstage.org/athome and on Facebook at facebook.com/thebroadstage. Each program is archived following the live stream for on-demand viewing.

To post a comment, you must register and login.