This episode was recorded Friday, November 3, 2023

Co-Hosts: Petra Kuppers and George Handley

FEATURED GUESTS/WORKS:

Mildred K. Barya, The Animals of My Earth School

“In the compassionate, playful, fable-like poems of The Animals of My Earth School, Mildred Kiconco Barya awakens us to the vividly singing, fully alive, non-human communities surrounding us. These poems demonstrate poetry’s unique ability to prick us from our self-involved numbness and awaken us to wonder. There is great solace, tenderness, and innocence here—the kind of innocence capable of apprehending the creatures of the world—and thus the world itself—afresh. Like a literary Noah’s ark of song, The Animals of My Earth School provides a place where all may dance and thrive. These poems provide pleasure and a glimmer of hope.”   —Michael Hettich, The Mica Mine

Mildred Kiconco Barya is a North Carolina-based writer, educator, and poet of East African descent. She’s the author of four full-length poetry collections, Men Love Chocolates But They Don’t Say, The Price of Memory After the Tsunami, Give Me Room to Move My Feet, and the recent The Animals of My Earth School. Her prose, hybrids, and poems have appeared in Shenandoah, Joyland, The Cincinnati Review, Tin House, New England Review, and elsewhere. She is currently Associate professor of Creative Writing and World Literature at University of North Carolina-Asheville. 

 

Ching-In Chen and Cassie Mira, Breathing in a Time of Disaster

Breathing in a Time of Disaster is a community-based writing, performance and installation project exploring the unit of breath. For the ASLE Spotlight, we will focus on showcasing excerpts from our online Breaths archive. We highlight stories and rituals from BIPOC and trans/nonbinary communities, which focus on individual and collective responses to disaster that disrupt mainstream narratives of changing climate in favor of witnessing creative everyday strategies of survival.

Ching-In Chen is a genderqueer Chinese American writer, community organizer and teacher. They are author of The Heart’s Traffic; recombinant (2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry); to make black paper sing and Kundiman for Kin: Information Retrieval for Monsters. Chen is co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities, a core member of Massage Parlor Outreach Project and a Kelsey Street Press collective member. They have received fellowships from Kundiman, Lambda, Watering Hole, Can Serrat, Imagining America, Jack Straw Cultural Center and Intercultural Leadership Institute as well as the Judith A. Markowitz Award for Exceptional New LGBTQ Writers. They teach at University of Washington Bothell and serve as Writer in Residence at Hugo House.

Cassie Mira is an interdisciplinary artist based in Seattle, WA. Her work analyzes transitional spaces by exploring human interaction through transitional experiences. Informed by research in LGBTQIA+ history and the development of modern computing, she investigates upheaval and adaptive responses of individuals and communities.

 

Ursula Heise, Environment and Narrative in Vietnam (forthcoming, co-edited with Chi Pham)

This book is a co-edited collection of essays about environment, narrative, and culture in Vietnam with contributors from France, Thailand, the US, and Vietnam. We analyze varying cultures/narratives of the environment from French colonialism to the Vietnam War, the Communist government from 1975 onward, and the transition to a market-oriented economy in the 1980s, with special attention to majority (Kinh) and ethnic minority narratives.

Ursula K. Heise is the Marcia H. Howard Term Chair in Literary Studies at UCLA. She is a former president of ASLE, and in 2019 was awarded an honorary membership during her keynote address at the biennial conference. Her books include Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global, and Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species.

Chi Pham is a Tenured Researcher at the Institute of Literature, Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences, Hanoi. Her books include Literature and Nation-building in Vietnam: The Invisibilization of the Indians and Revenge of Gaia: Contemporary Vietnamese Ecofiction, co-authored with Chitra Sankaran. Sankaran and Pham were awarded an ASLE Translation Grant in 2019 to support work on thieir volume. Pham will be unable to join the episode in person.

 

Naomi Ortiz, Rituals for Climate Change: A Crip Struggle for Ecojustice

Disability justice and ecojustice are rarely considered together but are in constant conversation in our world. Rituals for Climate Change: A Crip Struggle for Ecojustice, combining poetry and the lyrical essay, doesn’t contain just one point of view but encompasses dialectical perspectives which often exist in contradiction to each other. A disabled person is in need of plastic cups and concerned about the overwhelming plastic in our ecosystems. Ortiz expands on and complicates who is seen as an environmentalist and what being in relationship with the land can look like.

Naomi Ortiz (they/she) explores the cultivation of care and connection within states of stress. Reimagining our relationship with land and challenging who is an environmentalist in the Arizona U.S./Mexico borderlands, is investigated in their new collection, Rituals for Climate Change: A Crip Struggle for Ecojustice (punctum books). Their non-fiction book Sustaining Spirit: Self-Care for Social Justice (Reclamation Press) provides informative tools and insightful strategies for diverse communities on addressing burnout. As a 2022 Disability Futures Fellow and a Reclaiming the US/Mexico Border Narrative Grant Awardee, they emphasize interdependence and spiritual growth through their poetry, writing, facilitation, and visual art. www.NaomiOrtiz.com