Voices of Nature
In this six-session series, we explore how the voices of nature weave with our own daily lives. During each session, Danusha and James share work by guests, including poems and prompts, and together we absorb the wisdom of visionaries, poets and healers to bring ourselves more deeply into relationship with each other and with the power and beauty of this rich planet we share.
Each of the six 2-hour session begins with a talk with that week’s featured poet, followed by a discussion with Danusha and James, who read poems, offer gateways into accessing your own creative treasure troves, and share accompanying prompts. They answer questions from participants, and give further insights into the practice of poetry.
Each session includes a document with the poems and prompts shared and discussed.
$200.00
Guest Poets
Session 1 • Ada Limón
Ada Limón is the author of five poetry collections, including The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. Her fourth book Bright Dead Things was named a finalist for the National Book Award, the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship for Poetry, she serves on the faculty of Queens University of Charlotte Low Residency M.F.A program, lives in Lexington, Kentucky, and hosts The Slowdown podcast.
Session 2 • Naomi Shihab Nye
Naomi Shihab Nye is the Young People's Poet Laureate of the United States (Poetry Foundation). Her most recent books are Everything Comes Next, Collected & New Poems, Cast Away (Poems about Trash), The Tiny Journalist, and Voices in the Air - Poems for Listeners. She lives in San Antonio, Texas.
Session 3 • Camille Dungy
Camille T. Dungy’s debut collection of personal essays is Guidebook to Relative Strangers (W. W. Norton, 2017), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is also the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Trophic Cascade (Wesleyan UP, 2017), winner of the Colorado Book Award. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2019. Dungy’s other poetry collections are Smith Blue (Southern Illinois UP, 2011), finalist for the William Carlos Williams Award, Suck on the Marrow (Red Hen Press, 2010), winner of the American Book Award, and What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison (Red Hen Press, 2006), finalist for PEN the Center USA Literary Award for Poetry. Other honors include two Northern California Book Awards, a California Book Award silver medal, two NAACP Image Award nominations, two Hurston/Wright Legacy Award nominations, fellowships from the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and fellowships from the NEA in both poetry and prose. Dungy is currently a Professor in the English Department at Colorado State University. She lives in Fort Collins, CO with her husband and child.
Session 4 • Kimberly Blaeser
Kimberly Blaeser, past Wisconsin Poet Laureate, is the author of five poetry collections most recently Copper Yearning, Apprenticed to Justice, and the bi-lingual Résister en dansant/Ikwe-niimi: Dancing Resistance. An Indigenous activist and environmentalist from White Earth Reservation, she also edited Traces in Blood, Bone, and Stone: Contemporary Ojibwe Poetry. Her book Copper Yearning won the Edna Meudt Poetry Book Award and was named one of the best Native Books in 2019 by the Tribal College Journal. Her photographs, picto-poems, and ekphrastic pieces have been included in exhibits such as “Ancient Light” and “Visualizing Sovereignty.” A Professor at University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and MFA faculty for the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, Blaeser is founding director of the literary organization In-Na-Po—Indigenous Nations Poets. She lives in rural Wisconsin; and, for portions of each year, in a water-access cabin near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Minnesota. Kimberly's website.
Session 5 • Mark Nepo
With over a million copies sold, Mark Nepo has moved and inspired readers and seekers all over the world with his #1 New York Times bestseller The Book of Awakening. Beloved as a poet, teacher, and storyteller, Mark has been called “one of the finest spiritual guides of our time,” “a consummate storyteller,” and “an eloquent spiritual teacher.” A bestselling author, he has published twenty-two books and recorded fourteen audio projects. Recent work includes The Book of Soul (St. Martin’s Essentials, 2020) and Drinking from the River of Light, a Nautilus Award Winner (Sounds True, 2019). marknepo.com and threeintentions.com
Session 6 • Nickole Brown
Nickole Brown's first collection, Sister, a novel-in-poems, was first published in 2007 by Red Hen Press and her second book, a biography-in-poems called Fanny Says, came out from BOA Editions in 2015. She was an Assistant Professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock for four years until she gave up her beloved time in the classroom in hope of writing full time. Currently, she is the Editor for the Marie Alexander Poetry Series and teaches periodically at a number of places, including the Sewanee School of Letters MFA Program, the Great Smokies Writing Program at UNCA, and the Hindman Settlement School. She lives with her wife, poet Jessica Jacobs, in Asheville, NC, where she volunteers at a three different animal sanctuaries. Currently, she’s at work on a bestiary of sorts about these animals, but it won’t consist of the kind of pastorals that always made her (and most of the working-class folks she knows) feel shut out of nature and the writing about it—these poems speak in a queer, Southern-trash-talking kind of way about nature beautiful, but damaged and dangerous. The first of these new poems won Rattle's Chapbook Contest with the publication of To Those Who Were Our First Gods in 2018. A second chapbook from this project, an essay-in-poems called The Donkey Elegies, was published by Sibling Rivalry in January 2020.
Your Hosts
Danusha Laméris
Danusha Laméris’ first book, The Moons of August (2014), was chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye as the winner of the Autumn House Press Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Milt Kessler Book Award. Some of her work has been published in: The Best American Poetry, The New York Times, Orion, The American Poetry Review, The Gettysburg Review, Ploughshares, and Prairie Schooner. Her second book, Bonfire Opera, (University of Pittsburgh Press, Pitt Poetry Series), was a finalist for the 2021 Paterson Poetry Award and recipient of the Northern California Book Award in Poetry. She was the 2018-2020 Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz County, California, and is currently on the faculty of Pacific University’s low residency MFA program. www.danushalameris.com
James Crews
James Crews is editor of the bestselling anthology, How to Love the World, featured on NPR’s Morning Edition, as well as in The Boston Globe, and The Washington Post. He is the author of four prize-winning collections of poetry: The Book of What Stays, Telling My Father, Bluebird, and Every Waking Moment, and his poems have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Ploughshares, and The Sun. Crews teaches in the Poetry of Resilience seminars, and lives with his husband in Shaftsbury, Vermont. To sign up for weekly poems and prompts, visit: www.jamescrews.net.
Additional Details
The purchase of this series will provide you with online access to six 2-hour sessions (12 hours total) that were pre-recorded during a live, virtual series held on Zoom in February - March 2022. Each session can be viewed in video format or downloaded as an audio file (videos are not available to be downloaded). You will be provided with a login to access the recordings through the Poetry of Resilience website. Your purchase will provide you unlimited, lifetime access to this series. Purchases are non-refundable.
