T210.

Queer Eye for the Natural World: Writing Our Bodies, Desire, and Nature

Rooms 328-329, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 3
Thursday, March 9, 2023
3:20 pm to 4:35 pm

 

This multigenre panel will feature four authors employing queer ecology as a framework for their creative approaches. Through lively discussion, we’ll look at queer ecology’s role in contemporary literature as a site of interrogation: how do identity, desire, and social and environmental justice intersect to form a queer perspective on nature? We will explore connection and relational experience with a queer ecological sensibility shaping the expansiveness of a new kind of nature writing.



Outline & Supplemental Documents

Event Outline: AWP.OUTLINE_.pdf

Participants

Moderator:

Melissa Matthewson is the author of a memoir-in-essays, Tracing the Desire Line, from Split/Lip Press. Her essays have appeared in Literary Hub, Guernica, Oregon Humanities, and Catapult, among others. She teaches in the Eastern Oregon University low residency MFA program.

Marco Wilkinson is an assistant professor of literary arts and cultural studies in the Literature department at UC San Diego. His focus is on creative nonfiction and eco-writing. He is the author of MADDER: A Memoir in Weeds and his work has appeared in Ecotone, Kenyon Review, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere

Amie Whittemore is the author of Glass Harvest and an educator. She was an Academy of American Poets Poet Laureate Fellow and her work has appeared in Queer Nature, Cold Mountain Review, Terrain: a Journal of Built & Natural Environments, Gettysburg Review, The Southeast Review, and elsewhere.

Alicia Mountain is the author of High Ground Coward, which won the Iowa Poetry Prize, and Four in Hand (BOA Editions, 2023). She holds a MFA from the University of Montana and a PhD from the University of Denver. Dr. Mountain teaches in the Writer's Foundry MFA at St. Joseph's University in Brooklyn.

Kemi Alabi is a Chicago-based poet and culture worker. They're author of Against Heaven, selected by Claudia Rankine as winner of the Academy of American Poets First Book Award, and coeditor of The Echoing Ida Collection.

#AWP24

February 7–10, 2024
Kansas City, Missouri

Kansas City Convention Center