This November, Kent State University’s Wick Poetry Center will host the inaugural Poets for Science Gathering, an international convening that explores the connection between poetry and science.
The gathering will celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Poets for Science initiative, co-founded by poet Jane Hirshfield in partnership with the Wick Poetry Center for the 2017 March for Science. The three-day event, taking place Nov. 12-14, will bring together poets, scientists, educators, clinicians, students, environmental advocates, policymakers, artists and community members for readings, panels, workshops, performances, participatory events and informal conversations centered on the continuing need for cross-disciplinary exchange and alliance.
Featured speakers joining Hirshfield include current U.S. Poet Laureate Arthur Sze; former U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith; marine ecologist and former National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration administrator Jane Lubchenco, Ph.D.; the Nature Record and Earth Lab Director Phillip Levin; poet and environmental writer Camille T. Dungy; natural history writer and poet Diane Ackerman; essayist and cultural critic Maria Popova; and more.
The Poets for Science Gathering is expected to welcome up to 800 participants from across the world. The event will feature more than 75 intimate breakout sessions, including generative workshops, presentations, performances and panel discussions, exploring science and the imaginative life in such areas as environmental communication, health humanities, education, civic imagination and public life.
“This gathering creates a space for people to work across disciplines and to think together about creativity, inquiry, communication and community,” said David Hassler, the Bob and Walt Wick Executive Director of the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State. “We hope it becomes a meaningful site of exchange for anyone interested in how poetry and science can deepen public understanding and human connection.”
The Poets for Science Gathering will take place on Kent State’s campus in Kent, Ohio, and will include a book fair, community programming and opportunities for formal and informal collaborations across disciplines.
“If we hope to be full inhabitants of our own lives and full citizens in the shared life of this planet, the observations, experiments, imaginative explorations and openness to new possibilities carried by both science and poetry are equally needed, as is their precise expression in usable ways,” Hirshfield said. “Choices based on facts – as best we can know them – are calibrated also by emotion, imagination, feeling, experience. Emotions and hopes are in turn re-tuned, made more accurate to reality, by our knowledge of astrophysics, neuroscience, the workings of proteins. In joining outer and inner, objective and subjective paths of knowing, comes something perhaps findable in no other way: wisdom. And that is what this gathering is seeking – alongside, of course, new conversations, new friendships and a newly strengthened awareness of mutual curiosity and mutual support.”
Partners for the Gathering include Terrain.org, The Nature Record and Kent State’s College of Science and Humanities, Office of Sustainability, Environmental Science and Design Research Institute, Department of Physics and Brain Health Research Institute.
Generous support is provided by the Knight Foundation, Poetry Foundation, Ohio Arts Council and Woodward Foundation.
Learn more about Kent State’s Wick Poetry Center
Dear Human at the Edge of Time
Featuring art from Art x Climate, a project of
the Fifth National Climate Assessment
Compiled by Aileen Cassinetto and David Hassler
