Ada Limón
2:00 - 4:00 pm | Cleveland Botanical Garden, 11030 East Boulevard
This event will feature two sets of local poets sharing their work in the idyllic setting of the Cleveland Botanical Garden and revealing how nature has shaped their work. These readings will be following by A Poem Lovely As a Tree, a panel that brings together experts from the arts and sciences for a conversation about trees and climate change. The panelists include poet laureate of the United States, Ada Limón; provost of Case Western Reserve University, Joy Ward, an evolutionary biologist; and poetry editor of The Atlantic and chair of the Department of English, Walt Hunter.
Registration by April 10, 2025 is REQUIRED to get free admission to the Cleveland Botanical Garden. Register HERE.
About the Poets:
Ada Limón is the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States, making her the first Latina to ever be Poet Laureate of the United States. She will serve as Poet Laureate until the spring of 2025. Prior to this, Limón was a writer for various magazines such as GQ and Martha Stewart Living. Her poetry has appeared in magazines such as The New Yorker and Harvard Review. Ada Limón is a winner of the Autumn House Poetry Prize, the Pearl Poetry Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. She is the author of six books of poetry, including The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her book Bright Dead Things was nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Her most recent book of poetry, The Hurting Kind, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize. She was a Guggenheim fellow and wrote a poem that will be engraved on NASA's Europa Clipper Spacecraft that was launched to the second moon of Jupiter in October 2024. Her signature project is called You Are Here and focuses on how poetry can help connect us to the natural world. In October of 2023 she was awarded a MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship, and she was named a TIME magazine woman of the year in 2024.
Listen to a new poem written by Limón inspired by sculptor Andy Goldsworthy HERE.
Jason Harris currently serves as Editor-in-Chief for Gordon Square Review. His writing has been published in Hobart, Foundry Journal, Barren Magazine, The Shallow Ends, the Cleveland Review of Books, and more. Jason has received fellowships from the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, Juniper Summer Writing Institute, and The Watering Hole. He has served as the Barbara Smith Writer-in-Residence at Twelve Literary Arts as well as a co-editor to the forthcoming nature poetry anthology, Light Enters the Grove: Exploring Cuyahoga Valley National Park Through Poetry (The Kent State University Press).
Kortney Morrow is a poet and writer creating from her studio in Cleveland, Ohio. Her work has received support from 68to05, The Academy of American Poets, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Prairie Schooner, Tin House, and Transition Magazine. Her debut poetry collection, Run It Back, was the winner of the 2024 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize, judged by Carmen Giménez.
Caryl Pagel is Associate Professor and Director of the Poetry Center at Cleveland State University and a publisher and editor at Rescue Press. She is the author of three books of poetry—Free Clean Fill Dirt (University of Akron Press, fall 2022), Twice Told (University of Akron Press), and Experiments I Should Like Tried at My Own Death (Factory Hollow Press)—as well as a collection of essays, Out of Nowhere Into Nothing (FC2), and three chapbooks: Paul Revere’s (Essay Press), Mausoleum (WinterRed Press), and Visions, Crisis Apparitions, and Other Exceptional Experiences (Factory Hollow Press). She’s currently working on a book about the writer Lorine Niedecker and Niedecker’s relationship to regional politics, the Great Lakes, small press publishing, humor, and reading.
Lindsay Turner, Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Case Western Reserve University, is the author of the poetry collections The Upstate (University of Chicago Press, 2023) and Songs & Ballads (Prelude Books, 2018). Her translations from the French include books by Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Anne Dufourmantelle, Stéphane Bouquet, Frédéric Neyrat, Richard Rechtman, Ryoko Sekiguchi, and others. Her translation of Bouquet's The Next Loves was longlisted for the National Translation Awards, shortlisted for the Best Translated Book Award, and named a New York Times top 10 poetry collection of 2019, and she has twice received French Voices Grants for her translation work.
About the Panelists:
Walt Hunter, professor and chair of the CWRU department of English, is a contributing editor to The Atlantic and the author of Forms of a World: Contemporary Poetry and the Making of Globalization (Fordham UP, 2019), The American House Poem, 1945 – 2021 (Oxford UP, 2023), a poetry collection, Some Flowers (MadHat, 2022); and the translator of Fredric Neyrat’s Atopies: Manifesto for a Radical Existentialism (with Lindsay Turner; Fordham UP, 2017).
Joy K. Ward is the provost and executive vice president of Case Western Reserve University. She is also a professor of biology in the College of Arts and Sciences where she previously served as dean. She spearheaded the Experimental Humanities Initiative with funding from the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Foundation to support new education and research programs that integrate humanities more deeply with science and technology. As a researcher, Ward is internationally recognized for her work on how plants respond to rising atmospheric carbon dioxide and changing climate.