ECOPOETICS @ NAROPA

Public Registration for Naropa’s 2023 Spring Symposium on Eco Poetics is now open!

2 days, 3 events, 5 poets

https://www.eventbrite.com/.../jack-kerouac-schoolmfa...

Monday, March 20 | 7:00 pm MST

Leslie Scalapino Lecture in Innovative Poetics w/ Jen Bervin

Tuesday, March 21 | 12:00 pm MST

Saretta Morgan, Abignail Chapitnoy, and Jennifer Scappettone

Tuesday, March 21 | 7:00 pm MST

Symposium Reading w/ Tom Comitta, Saretta Morgan, Abignail Chapitnoy, Jennifer Scappettone, and Jen Bervin

JEN BERVIN is an artist and poet whose multidisciplinary practice delves into entangled relationships between text, textiles, and situated poetics to create complex, yet elegant work. Her conceptual, scientific, and literary investigations of material histories result from long-term research and collaboration with artists and specialists ranging from literary scholars to material scientists. Bervin’s solo and collaborative multidisciplinary works have been exhibited internationally and can be found in more than sixty international collections, including The J. Paul Getty Museum. Her books include Jen Bervin: Shift Rotate Reflect, Selected Works (1997–2020), organized by Kendra Paitz, Gorgeous Nothings: Emily Dickinson’s Envelope Poems, Silk Poems, Nets, and many others. She is the recipient of a Creative Capital Foundation Grant, Rauschenberg Residency, and numerous fellowships.

EcoPoetics Panelists

ABIGAIL CHABITNOY is a Koniag descendant and member of the Tangirnaq Native Village in Kodiak. She is the author of In the Current Where Drowning Is Beautiful (Wesleyan 2022) and How to Dress a Fish (Wesleyan 2019), shortlisted for the 2020 International Griffin Prize for Poetry and winner of the 2020 Colorado Book Award, and the linocut illustrated chapbook Converging Lines of Light (Flower Press 2021). Her poems have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Boston Review, Tin House, Gulf Coast, LitHub, and Red Ink, among others. She currently teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts and is an assistant professor at UMass Amherst. Find her at salmonfisherpoet.com.

SARETTA MORGAN is the author of Alt-Nature (Coffee House Press, 2024), and the chapbooks Feeling Upon Arrival (Ugly Duckling Press, 2018), and room for a counter interior (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2017). Her poems have appeared in Best American Experimental Writing, The Volta, the Academy of American Poets, Split This Rock, Triple Canopy, and elsewhere.

Drawing from Black studies, feminist literary traditions, and her experiences with land stewardship, incarceration, global militarism, Indigenous sovereignty work and grassroots migrant justice efforts in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, her writing pursues relationships between geography and feeling, particularly as both locate bodies and thought along intersections of settler colonialism and U.S. imperialism.

She has received support from the Jerome Foundation, Arizona Commission on the Arts, Tucson MoCA, Tamaas Cross Cultural Organization and elsewhere. She has been an Artist in Residence at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Headlands Center for the Arts, the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, and Oak Spring Garden Foundation.

She lives on Akimel O'odham lands in Phoenix, AZ.

JENNIFER SCAPPETTONE works at the confluence of poetics, scholarly research, and art practice to rethink the way language shapes our relation to built and natural environments. She is the author of the cross-genre verse books From Dame Quickly (Litmus Press, 2009) and The Republic of Exit 43: Outtakes & Scores from an Archaeology and Pop-Up Opera of the Corporate Dump (Atelos Press, 2016), the latter a study of two landfills: the notorious Fresh Kills in the middle of New York Harbor, and the reticent Superfund-listed toxic waste dump across from her family home on Long Island. Her translations of the polyglot poet and refugee from Fascist Italy Amelia Rosselli were collected in the book Locomotrix: Selected Poetry and Prose of Amelia Rosselli(University of Chicago Press, 2012), which won the Academy of American Poets's Raiziss/De Palchi Prize; and she founded PennSound Italiana, a section of the audiovisual archive devoted to Italian experimental poetry.

Scappettone has worked solo and in collaboration with musicians, architects, code artists, and dancers on site-specific performance pieces at locations ranging from the tract of Trajan’s aqueduct under Rome’s Janiculum Hill to Fresh Kills Landfill—the latter a collaboration with choreographer Kathy Westwater and designer Seung Jae Lee, with re-performance and a collateral exhibition in Fall 2022 at the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art. Her most recent poetry volume is SMOKEPENNY LYRICHORD HEAVENBRED: 2 Acts (The Elephants, 2018), a libretto composed for mixed-reality performance with artist/technologists Judd Morrissey and Aviva Avnisan. Pennies from Nether, Scappettone's work in progress on the global footprint of copper extraction underpinning the so-called “cloud,” was shortlisted for the 2023 Creative Capital Award in Literature.

Scappettone’s critical study Killing the Moonlight: Modernism in Venice (Columbia University Press, 2014) charted the resistance of an archipelagic cosmopolis to modernist development; her forthcoming study of how poetry by "stateless" persons might alter the grounds of national languages and political belonging is titled Poetry After Barbarism: Fascism, the Xenoglossic Word, and the Invention of a Motherless Tongue. Scappettone has been a fellow at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation and the Center for Italian Modern Art, the Bogliasco Foundation, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the iLAND foundation, the Stanford Center for the Humanities, and the American Academy in Rome, among other honors. She is an associate professor of English, Creative Writing, Romance Languages and Literatures, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Environment, Geography, and Urbanization at the University of Chicago. She is also currently Visiting Professor at the Université Gustave Eiffel in Paris, where she is leading a research program and international colloquium on the geopoetics of urban watersheds.

MFA in Creative Writing (low-res) Fall 2022 Artist-in-Residence:

TOM COMITTA (they/them) is the author of The Nature Book (Coffee House Press), Patchwork (Coffee House Press, forthcoming 2025), ◯ (Ugly Ducking Presse), Airport Novella (Troll Thread), SENT (Invisible Venue), First Thought Worst Thought: Collected Books 2011-2014 (Gauss PDF), a print and digital archive of the 40 books he produced in four years. Their fiction and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in WIRED, Lit Hub, Electric Literature, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Kenyon Review, BOMB, Joyland, and Best American Experimental Writing 2020, with two poems in The New Concrete (Hayward Publishing, UK), an international anthology surveying the “rise of concrete poetry in the digital age.”

From 2011-12 Comitta composed and conducted nine operas with SF Guerrilla Opera, a roving ensemble that gave voice to found texts at numerous sites around the Bay Area including the Civic Center BART station and the Berkeley Art Museum. In 2012 Comitta staged National Novel Writing Night Month (NaNoWriNiMo), a futurist improvement on the popular write-a-novel-in-a-month contest in which they wrote, designed and published novels written in a night. In 2015 The Royal Nonesuch Gallery in Oakland exhibited Comitta’s solo show First Thought Worst Thought, an interactive archive containing the 40 books Comitta composed between 2011 and 2014 as well as accompanying works in video, drawing, digital printing, window decals, and an original computer program. In 2017 The Walker Art Center and The Southern Theater commissioned Comitta and the performance duo Fire Drill to stage Bill: The Musikill, an experimental musical, at Minneapolis’s Momentum Dance Festival.

Comitta has exhibited books, texts and videos at MOCA Grand, Los Angeles; LUMA Foundation, Zürich; swissnex, San Francisco; Reed College, Portland; Robert Berman/E6 Gallery, San Francisco and The Kala Art Institute, Berkeley. They were a 2017 recipient of an Emergency Grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Art and a 2023 grant from the New York State Council for the Arts. Comitta has held residencies at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, the Bay Area Video Coalition, Little Paper Planes/Minnesota Street Project, and San Francisco Arts Education Project, where they conducted multimedia writing workshops with San Francisco youth.

Naropa University welcomes participants with diverse abilities. If you require accommodations, please contact CAROLINE SWANSON at cswanson@naropa.edu prior to the event.

For more information on Kerouac School events visit: https://www.naropa.edu/academics/jks/events/index.php