Sep 13, 2018, 5:00 pm
City
Cedar City
Southwest Region
Venue
Southern Utah University351 W University Blvd
Cedar City , UT 84720-2415
Map [+]
Description
Nicole Walker and Poet Lee Ann Roripaugh discuss their latest books on Thursday, September 13th at 5:30 PM. This event will take place at the J. Reuben Clark Alumni House on the SUU campus and is part of the Writing About Ecology and Place Conference. For more info, please visit: https://www.suu.edu/hss/english/writingconference/
In Sustainability: A Love Story, Nicole Walker questions what it means to live sustainably while still being able to have internet and eat bacon. Armed with research and a bright irony, playfully addressing the devastation of the world around us, Walker delves deep into scarcity and abundance, but not just in nature, reflecting on matters that range from her uneasy relationship with bats to the fragility of human life, from adolescent lies to what recycling can reveal about our not so moderate drinking habits. With laugh out loud sad-funny moments, and a stark humor, Walker appeals to our innate sense of personal commitment to sustaining our world, and our commitment to sustaining our marriages, our families, our lives, ourselves.
Walker is the author of Where the Tiny Things Are, Egg, Micrograms, Quench Your Thirst with Salt, and This Noisy Egg. She curated, with Rebecca Campbell, 7 Artists, 7 Rings—an Artist’s Game of Telephone for the Huffington Post. A recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a notable essayist in Best American 2008, 2014, 2015, and 2016 and nonfiction winner of Best of the Net in 2013 and 2014, she’s an Associate Professor at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona.
Lee Ann Roripaugh’s fourth collection of poems, Danadarians, maps the illusory and ephemeral connection between identities and language. Based on sources as diverse as Heian-period Japanese women writers and the world of science fiction, and drawing on her own experience as a second-generation Japanese American, Dandarians explores a series of “word betrayals”—English words misunderstood in transmission from her Japanese mother that came to take on symbolic ramifications in her early years. Co-opting and repurposing the language of knowledge and of misunderstanding, and dialoguing in original ways with notions of diaspora and hybrid identities, these poems demonstrate the many ways we attempt to be understood, culminating in an experience of aural awe.
Lee Ann Roripaigh is the author of numerous collections of poems, including Dandarians and the forthcoming collection tsunami vs. the fukushima 50. Her first collection, Beyond Heary Mountain, was selected by Ishmael Reed as a National Poetry Series winner, and her second collection, Year of the Snake, was named winner of the Association of Asian American Studies Book Award. Recipient of an Archibald Bush Foundation Artist Fellowship, she received the Frederick Manfred Award from the Western Literature Association, the Randall Jarrell International Poetry Prize, and an Academy of American Poets prize. She serves as Editor-in-Chief of South Dakota Review and directs the creative writing program at the University of South Dakota. She resides in Vermillion and is currently the South Dakota Poet Laureate.
This event was made possible with support from Southern Utah University and Utah Humanities.
