Speakers and Panelists
Our list of keynote speakers includes scholars, activists and writers working on/in different undergrounds: oil literatures, cultures and histories; the poetics and politics of extractive industry; fungal networks and lichen worlds; grassroots movements focused on food security and community agriculture with marginalized communities; indigenous land/literary resistances; and local “underground” writers of ecology and place.
LINDA HOGAN (The Great Line: The Long Connection of Earth and Other Beings) is former Writer in Residence for the Chickasaw Nation and Professor Emerita at the University of Colorado; an internationally recognized poet, novelist and essayist, she is the author of such multiple prize winning works as Solar Storms and Rounding the Human Corners, in addition to the forthcoming Dark. Sweet. New and Selected Poems.
STEPHANIE LEMENAGER (Being Human, or the Everyday Anthropocene) is Barbara and Carlisle Moore Professor of English and Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of Oregon. Her publications include the books Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century, Manifest and Other Destinies and (as co-editor) Environmental Criticism for the Twenty-First Century. She is a founding editor of Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities.
JORGE NAVARRO was raised by Consuelo Navarro, a single, monolingual Spanish-speaking woman, in Los Angeles, California, and is a first generation Mexican American. His introduction to activism formally began in the late 1960’s, as a conscientious objector to the Vietnam war and subsequently as a teacher’s assistant teaching remedial mathematics to at risk Latino youth in Anaheim, California. From this point his “education” included migrating to Eugene Oregon in 1973, where his experience includes tree planter, waiter, executive director of a small social services agency, drug and alcohol counselor, gambling counselor, pre-school teacher, musician, sound engineer, social justice program manager, and owner of a small restaurant. He is currently the program manager for Huerto de la Familia, a nonprofit offering Latino families training in organic gardening and farming and the development of food-based micro-enterprises. The one common link in all of this has been food. The spiritual, political, and cultural impact of food on the planet and its inhabitants continues to inspire and center Jorge’s exploration of the world.
LIFE UNDERGROUND: A DIALOGUE
DONNA HARAWAY is Distinguished Professor Emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz; she is the author of seven books including Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science and When Species Meet, in addition to countless influential articles in feminist politics, science studies and animal studies, some of which are anthologized in The Haraway Reader.
ANNA TSING is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz and Niels Bohr Professor at Aarhus University, Denmark; the author of Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection, she is also a leader of the Matsutake Worlds Research Group, which explores the ways in which these mushrooms open up global multispecies publics.
EXTRACTIVE AND UNDERGROUND POETICS: READINGS AND CONVERSATION (THURSDAY)
ANN FISHER-WIRTH is Professor of English and Director of the
Minor in Environmental Studies at the University of Mississippi, and a former
President of ASLE. She is coeditor (with Laura-Gray Street) of the
groundbreaking Ecopoetry Anthology
(Trinity University Press 2013, reissued 2014). Her four books of poems include
Dream Cabinet (Wings Press 2012) and Carta Marina (Wings Press 2009); her
chapbooks include First, earth (Chapbook
2014), Slide Shows (Finishing Line
2009), and Walking Wu-wei’s Scroll (Drunken
Boat 2005). Her poems have received numerous awards, including a Malahat Review Long Poem Prize, the Rita Dove Poetry Award, and
fourteen Pushcart nominations including a Special Mention. Currently she is
working on a collaborative project called Mississippi
with the acclaimed Delta photographer Maude Schuyler Clay.
A Fellow in Writing of the University of Iowa, TANURE OJAIDE has published seventeen collections of poetry, three collections of short stories, two memoirs, four novels, and scholarly works including The Poetry of Wole Soyinka; Poetry, Art, and Performance: Udje Dance Songs of the Urhobo People; and Contemporary African Literature: New Approaches. His literary awards include the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for the Africa Region (1987), the All-Africa Okigbo Prize for Poetry (1988, 1997), the BBC Arts and Africa Poetry Award (1988), and the Association of Nigerian Authors Poetry Award (1988, 1994, 2003, and 2011). Ojaide taught for many years at The University of Maiduguri (Nigeria), and is currently The Frank Porter Graham Professor of Africana Studies at The University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
RITA WONG is an Associate Professor in Critical and Cultural Studies at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. She is the author of four books of poetry: undercurrent (forthcoming with Nightwood Editions, 2015), sybil unrest (co-written with Larissa Lai, Line Books, 2008), forage (Nightwood 2007, winner of Canada Reads Poetry 2011), and monkeypuzzle (Press Gang 1998); her writing has also appeared in journals and anthologies such as Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society; the Feminist Review; Capitalism Nature Socialism; and Thinking with Water. Wong lives on the unceded Coast Salish territories otherwise known as Vancouver, BC, where her work investigates the relationships among contemporary poetics, social justice, ecology, and decolonization.
A GATHERING OF PALOUSE WRITERS
Join celebrated writers from the University of Idaho and others for a literary celebration and conversation about the inland Northwest: oil, soil, rivers, mountains, lentils, and more.
KIM BARNES is the author of In the Kingdom of Men, named a best book of 2012 by The San Francisco Chronicle, The Seattle Times and The Oregonian and long-listed for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Her second novel, A Country Called Home, winner of the 2009 PEN Center USA Literary Award for Fiction, was named a best book of 2008 by The Washington Post, The Kansas City Star and The Oregonian. She is a recipient of the PEN/Jerard Award in nonfiction for her first memoir, In the Wilderness, which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Her work has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including The New York Times, WSJ online, The Georgia Review, Shenandoah, Fourth Genre, Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly and the Pushcart Prize anthology. She is a Professor of English in the MFA program at the University of Idaho. http://www.kimbarnes.com/
MARY CLEARMAN BLEW’s most recent book is This Is Not the Ivy League: A Memoir. Her fiction collection, Runaway, won a Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, as did her memoir All But the Waltz: Essays on a Montana Family. A novel, Jackalope Dreams, won the 2008 Western Heritage Award. She teaches creative writing at the University of Idaho and Pacific Lutheran University.
PETER CHILSON teaches writing and literature at Washington State University. He is the author most recently of We Never Knew Exactly Where: Dispatches from the Lost Country of Mali; of the travelogue Riding the Demon: On the Road in West Africa, which won the Associated Writing Programs Award in nonfiction; and of the story collection Disturbance-Loving Species: A Novella and Stories, winner of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference Bakeless Fiction Prize and the Maria Thomas Fiction Prize. His essays, journalism, and short stories have appeared in Foreign Policy, The American Scholar, Gulf Coast, High Country News, Audubon, Ascent and The North American Review among other publications, as well as twice in the Best American Travel Writing anthology. In 2012 he went to Mali to cover the civil war for Foreign Policy magazine.
REBECCA M. GOODRICH received her MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Idaho. Since then she's published award-winning nonfiction, fiction, and poetry in a variety of journals and anthologies including the Potomac Review and Fourth River: A journal of nature and place-based writing. She currently teaches creative writing and digital storytelling at Washington State University. She also serves as the Assistant Director of the Digital Technology and Culture degree program in the WSU Department of English.
D.J. LEE is professor of literature and creative writing at Washington State University where she co-directs the Visiting Writers Series. She has authored and edited six books focused on the literature and history of the nineteenth century, including Romantic Liars: Obscure Women Who Became Imposters and Challenged an Empire; Literature, Science, and Exploration in the Romantic Era: Bodies of Knowledge; and Slavery and the Romantic Imagination. She has received a National Endowment for the Humanities Grant, an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, and the Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship. Lee writes about the natural world for the Los Angeles Review of Books, and her creative nonfiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Narrative, Vela, Silk Road Review, and the Montreal Review. She has just completed a collection of essays called The Land Speaks and a memoir called Bitter Roots about the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness of Idaho and Montana. She is an advisory board member for the Selway-Bitterroot Frank Church Foundation.
TIFFANY MIDGE is the recipient of the Kenyon Review Earthworks Prize for Indigenous Poetry for The Woman Who Married a Bear and the Diane Decorah Memorial Poetry Award for Outlaws, Renegades and Saints: Diary of a Mixed-up Halfbreed. Her work has appeared in North American Review, The Raven Chronicles, Florida Review, South Dakota Review, Shenandoah and Yellow Medicine Review. An enrolled Standing Rock Sioux, she holds an MFA from the University of Idaho and is the poetry editor for the Indigenous Literature journal Four Winds http://fourwindslitmag.org/.
LINDA RUSSO is the author of three books of poetry, including The Enhanced Immediacy of the Everyday and Meaning to Go to the Origin in Some Way; a collection of lyric essays, To Think of her Writing Awash in Light, selected by John D’Agata as the winner of Subito Press inaugural creative nonfiction prize, is forthcoming. Scholarly essays have appeared in Among Friends: Engendering the Social Site of Poetry and other edited collections, and as the preface of Joanne Kyger's About Now: Collected Poems. A resident of the Palouse for over seven years, she teaches at Washington State University. http://inhabitorypoetics.blogspot.com
ROBERT WRIGLEY has published ten books of poems, including most recently Anatomy of Melancholy & Other Poems and, in the United Kingdom, The Church of Omnivorous Light: Selected Poems. A former Guggenheim and two-time NEA Fellow, he teaches at the University of Idaho and lives in the woods, near Moscow with his wife, the writer Kim Barnes.
MARY CLEARMAN BLEW’s most recent book is This Is Not the Ivy League: A Memoir. Her fiction collection, Runaway, won a Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, as did her memoir All But the Waltz: Essays on a Montana Family. A novel, Jackalope Dreams, won the 2008 Western Heritage Award. She teaches creative writing at the University of Idaho and Pacific Lutheran University.
PETER CHILSON teaches writing and literature at Washington State University. He is the author most recently of We Never Knew Exactly Where: Dispatches from the Lost Country of Mali; of the travelogue Riding the Demon: On the Road in West Africa, which won the Associated Writing Programs Award in nonfiction; and of the story collection Disturbance-Loving Species: A Novella and Stories, winner of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference Bakeless Fiction Prize and the Maria Thomas Fiction Prize. His essays, journalism, and short stories have appeared in Foreign Policy, The American Scholar, Gulf Coast, High Country News, Audubon, Ascent and The North American Review among other publications, as well as twice in the Best American Travel Writing anthology. In 2012 he went to Mali to cover the civil war for Foreign Policy magazine.
REBECCA M. GOODRICH received her MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Idaho. Since then she's published award-winning nonfiction, fiction, and poetry in a variety of journals and anthologies including the Potomac Review and Fourth River: A journal of nature and place-based writing. She currently teaches creative writing and digital storytelling at Washington State University. She also serves as the Assistant Director of the Digital Technology and Culture degree program in the WSU Department of English.
D.J. LEE is professor of literature and creative writing at Washington State University where she co-directs the Visiting Writers Series. She has authored and edited six books focused on the literature and history of the nineteenth century, including Romantic Liars: Obscure Women Who Became Imposters and Challenged an Empire; Literature, Science, and Exploration in the Romantic Era: Bodies of Knowledge; and Slavery and the Romantic Imagination. She has received a National Endowment for the Humanities Grant, an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, and the Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship. Lee writes about the natural world for the Los Angeles Review of Books, and her creative nonfiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Narrative, Vela, Silk Road Review, and the Montreal Review. She has just completed a collection of essays called The Land Speaks and a memoir called Bitter Roots about the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness of Idaho and Montana. She is an advisory board member for the Selway-Bitterroot Frank Church Foundation.
TIFFANY MIDGE is the recipient of the Kenyon Review Earthworks Prize for Indigenous Poetry for The Woman Who Married a Bear and the Diane Decorah Memorial Poetry Award for Outlaws, Renegades and Saints: Diary of a Mixed-up Halfbreed. Her work has appeared in North American Review, The Raven Chronicles, Florida Review, South Dakota Review, Shenandoah and Yellow Medicine Review. An enrolled Standing Rock Sioux, she holds an MFA from the University of Idaho and is the poetry editor for the Indigenous Literature journal Four Winds http://fourwindslitmag.org/.
LINDA RUSSO is the author of three books of poetry, including The Enhanced Immediacy of the Everyday and Meaning to Go to the Origin in Some Way; a collection of lyric essays, To Think of her Writing Awash in Light, selected by John D’Agata as the winner of Subito Press inaugural creative nonfiction prize, is forthcoming. Scholarly essays have appeared in Among Friends: Engendering the Social Site of Poetry and other edited collections, and as the preface of Joanne Kyger's About Now: Collected Poems. A resident of the Palouse for over seven years, she teaches at Washington State University. http://inhabitorypoetics.blogspot.com
ROBERT WRIGLEY has published ten books of poems, including most recently Anatomy of Melancholy & Other Poems and, in the United Kingdom, The Church of Omnivorous Light: Selected Poems. A former Guggenheim and two-time NEA Fellow, he teaches at the University of Idaho and lives in the woods, near Moscow with his wife, the writer Kim Barnes.