Monday, May 19, 2008

Calendar Alert: Three Poets, A Magician, Lots More, at Sterling College, Craftsbury Common, VT, 6/3


[photo, poet Sandra Steingraber]


Craftsbury Common, VT – For a week each June for more than twenty years, people from around the country have come to Sterling College as participants of the Wildbranch Writing Workshop. The workshop, co-sponsored by Orion Magazine, targets writers interested in outdoor, natural history, and environmental writing, as well as environmental educators and activists who want to bring better writing to their work.

On Wednesday, June 4, at 7:00 pm, in Simpson Hall, Wildbranch faculty will present an evening of readings from their own works. These faculty include: David Abram, Janisse Ray, Scott Russell Sanders and Sandra Steingraber. The readings are free and open to the public.

Biologist, poet, and environmental writer SANDRA STEINGRABER is the author of Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment, Having Faith: An Ecologist's Journey to Motherhood, and Post-Diagnosis, a volume of poetry. Steingraber's investigative writing has received recognition from the Jenifer Altman Foundation, Ms. Magazine, the American Medical Writers Association, and Rachel Carson's alma mater Chatham College, which, in 2001, selected Steingraber to receive its biennial Rachel Carson Leadership Award.

Holding a Ph.D. in biological sciences and a master's degree in creative writing, she is currently a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Ithaca College and serves as a contributing editor at Orion.

Cultural ecologist, writer, and philosopher, DAVID ABRAM is also an accomplished storyteller and sleight-of-hand magician. He is the author of The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World, for which he received the Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction. His essays on the cultural causes and consequences of ecological disarray have appeared in such journals as Orion, Parabola, Environmental Ethics, and The Ecologist as well as in numerous anthologies. The father of two small children, David lives at the edge of the Sangre de Cristo mountains in northern New Mexico.

JANISSE RAY is a writer, naturalist, and activist. She is the award- winning author of three books of creative nonfiction—Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, Wild Card Quilt: Taking a Chance on Home, and Pinhook: Finding Wholeness in a Fragmented Land—and the editor of three others. More than personal narratives, her books are commentary on social and ecological life and calls to action. Her essays, poetry, and fiction have appeared in numerous periodicals and anthologies.

SCOTT RUSSELL SANDERS is the author of nineteen books, including Staying Put, Hunting for Hope, and A Private History of Awe. Winner of the Lannan Literary Award and the John Burroughs Essay Award, he has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Since 1971 he has taught at Indiana University and has lived in the watershed of the White River in the hardwood hills of southern Indiana.

H. EMERSON BLAKE was trained as an ecologist, and his first editorial job was with a biology journal. After a decade as an editor at Orion, he assumed the role of editor-in-chief at Milkweed Editions, a book publisher. In 2005 he returned to Orion to serve as the magazine's editor-in-chief and as the executive director of The Orion Society. He is the editor of hundreds of magazine articles, as well as many books of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and children's fiction.

JENNIFER SAHN is editor of Orion magazine. Articles she has edited have won John Burroughs Essay Awards, Pushcart Prizes, and have been reprinted in the Best American Science and Nature Writing and Best Creative Nonfiction. She has been on the editorial staff of Orion for the past fifteen years, during which time she also worked closely with the education and outreach programs of The Orion Society. Her writing has been published in a variety of print venues and she has served as the editor for several book projects.

For more information on the Evening of Readings, please contact Sterling College at 802-586-7711, ext 159.

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