Earth, Spirit & Society in Poetry and Prose

Join us for an evening of poetry, dramatic readings and stories with the Fellows of the Black Earth Institute. BEI is a national organization with a home in Black Earth composed of artists addressing the issues of spirit, earth and social justice. The art presented will speak to both timely and universal issues from the work and changes the fellows are active in. Coming from seven different states Tammy Gomez, Melissa Tuckey, Metta Sama, Lauren Camp, Ann Fisher-Wirth, Taylor Brorby,and Todd Davis will inspire and impress.

Free event with light refreshments. Doors open at 7.

Contact Info: Michael McDermott, (312) 636-6157

Tammy Gomez

Currently based in Texas, Tammy Gomez is a poet, multimedia performer, and playwright/director. As award-winning poet (Best Poet of Austin, Austin Chronicle, 1997), she has performed throughout the U.S., and in Mexico and Nepal. Her poems and essays are featured in numerous collections, including Yellow Medicine Review (2009) and Women in Nature: An Anthology (Louise Grace Publishing, 2014). Tammy is profiled in Las Tejanas: 300 Years of History (UT Press, 2003), and is featured in Voices from Texas, a PBS documentary film about Latino poets in Texas.

Sound Culture, founded by Tammy Gomez and based in north Texas, is an intermedia production lab that emphasizes the spirit of community and collaboration among artists of various disciplines to enhance individual creative expression and social justice literacy through stage performance, interactive design, spoken word innovation, print publications, online and live event production... Read More

Melissa Tuckey

Melissa Tuckey is a poet, writer, and editor with a background in environmental and social justice activism. She has worked as a professional writer and community organizer in the military toxics movement. Tuckey is co-founder with Sarah Browning, Reggie Cabio, and Jaime Jarvis, of Split This Rock, a national literary organization dedicated to poetry of provocation and witness. Her poetry is fed and inspired by these experiences.

Tuckey is author of two collections of poetry. Tenuous Chapel was selected by Charles Simic for the ABZ Press First Book Award (2013). Rope as Witness, a chapbook was published by Pudding House Press (2007). Her honors include a winter fellowship at Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and artist awards from Ohio Arts Council and DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, as well as a residency at Blue Mountain Center. She’s currently at work as editor of Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology, forthcoming with... Read More

Metta Sáma

Metta Sáma is author of le animal & other creatures (Miel Books), After “Sleeping to Dream”/After After (Nous-Zot), Nocturne Trio (YesYes Books) & South of Here. Her poems, fiction, and creative nonfiction essays have been published in Heir Apparent, Valley Voices, Puerto del Sol’s Black Voices Series, Literary Hub, Kweli, bluestem, Apogee, All About Skin (edited by Jina Ortiz & Rochelle Spencer), Please Excuse This Poem: 100 Poets for the Next Generation (edited by Lynn Melnick & Brett Fletcher Lauer), among others. She has served as special guest editor for Reverie, Black Camera, RedLeaf Poetry Journal, and North American Review. She serves on the advisory board of Black Radish Books and the Board of Directors at Cave Canem and VIDA: Women in Literary Arts. Metta is a Fellow at Black Earth Institute, the director... Read More

Lauren Camp

Lauren Camp is the author of five books, most recently Took House (Tupelo Press, 2020). Her poems have appeared in The Los Angeles Review, Pleiades, the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series, Poet Lore, Slice, DIAGRAM, and other journals. Winner of the Dorset Prize, Lauren has also received fellowships from The Black Earth Institute and The Taft-Nicholson Center, and finalist citations for the Arab American Book Award, the Housatonic Book Award and the New Mexico-Arizona Book Award.

Ann Fisher-Wirth

Ann Fisher-Wirth is the daughter of a career Army officer and an English teacher. Her fourth book of poems, Dream Cabinet, was published by Wings Press in 2012. Her other books of poems are Carta Marina, Blue Window, and Five Terraces, and her chapbooks are First, earth; Slide Shows; Walking Wu-Wei’s Scroll; and The Trinket Poems. With Laura-Gray Street, she coedited the groundbreaking Ecopoetry Anthology, published by Trinity University Press in 2013. Her poems have received numerous awards, including a Malahat Review Long Poem Prize, the Rita Dove Poetry Award, the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Poetry Award, two Mississippi Arts Commission fellowships, and thirteen Pushcart nominations including a Special Mention. They have been published in journals such as Prairie Schooner, Blackbird, The Valparaiso Review,Terrain.org, CutThroat,... Read More

Taylor Brorby

Taylor Brorby is an essayist, poet, and environmentalist. He received his M.A. in Liberal Studies from Hamline University in 2013, and is currently pursuing his MFA in Creative Writing and Environment at Iowa State University.Taylor’s work has appeared in Written River; Rock, Paper, Scissors; The Englewood Review of Books, on Minnesota Public Radio, North Dakota Public Radio, numerous newspapers, Augsburg Fortress,On Second Thought, the Northern Plains Ethics Journal, Chelsea Station, The EcoTheo Review, Sleet Magazine, High Country News, The Loft’s Writer’s Block, the anthology Kissing in the Chapel, Praying in the Frat House: Wrestling with Faith and College.

Taylor has been awarded grants from Hamline University, St. Olaf College, Iowa State University, the North Dakota Humanities Council, and received Honorable Mention in The Loft’s Mentor Series. He has... Read More

Todd Davis

Todd Davis is the son of a veterinarian and United Methodist lay minister and the grandson of subsistence farmers. His poetry offers portraits of the cycles of birth and death in the woods and streams of his homeground in Pennsylvania. While never leaving behind the tragedies and joys of the human world, fusing narrative and lyrical impulses, his work seeks to address the living world through a lens of transformation. In poems of praise and lament that draw upon the classical Chinese rivers-and-mountains tradition, Davis chronicles the creatures of forest and sky, of streams and lakes, moving through cycles of fecundity and lack, paying witness to the fundamental processes of the earth that offer the possibility of regeneration, even resurrection. Davis is the author of five full-length collections—Winterkill, In the Kingdom of the Ditch, The Least of These, Some Heaven, and Ripe—as well as of a limited edition chapbook, Household... Read More