Part of the literary series, Modern Real and Surreal: Writers & Artists on Our Age.

Our identities - our race, ethnicity, gender, class - are vital to how we see nature.  In this event, we explore how identity intersects with history and politics to shape our interactions with and understanding of the environment around us.

Participants:

Mistinguette Smith writes across boundaries between race and culture, urban and rural, academic and vernacular. She is a poet, essayist and director of The Black/Land Project, which uses narrative research and community workshops to understand the nature of race, land and place. Her poems and essays have appeared in black LGBT anthologies including Does Your Mama Know, and Other Countries: Voices Rising and literary journals, including Pluck! A Journal of Affrilachian Arts and Culture. Her creative non-fiction about race, land and place has appeared in YES! Magazine, Belt Magazine, The Common Online and in the textbooks The Colors of Nature: A Teaching Guide and Wildness: Relations of People and Place forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press in 2017. As a public scholar she has co-authored critical theory about race, geography and collaboration for academic journals including Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, American Quarterly, and Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society.

Tracing memory threads Lauret Edith Savoy’s life and work: unearthing what is buried, re-membering what is fragmented, shattered, eroded. A woman of African American, Euro-American, and Native American heritage, she writes about the stories we tell of the American land’s origins and the stories we tell of ourselves in this land. Her books include Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape; The Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity and the Natural World; Bedrock: Writers on the Wonders of Geology; and Living with the Changing California Coast.  Trace won the 2016 American Book Award.  It was also a finalist for both the 2016 PEN American Open Book Award and Phillis Wheatley Book Award, as well as shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing and Orion Book Award. Lauret is a professor of environmental studies and geology at Mount Holyoke College, a photographer, and pilot. Winner of Mount Holyoke’s Distinguished Teaching Award, she has also held fellowships from the Smithsonian Institution and Yale University. She is a Fellow of the Geological Society of America.

Naila Moreira is a writer, journalist, and naturalist whose work often focuses on the natural world. Her 2014 poetry chapbook Gorgeous Infidelities was published as an art book in collaboration with photographer Paul Ickovic. Her latest chapbook,Water Street was published by Finishing Line Press. Set in an old converted farmhouse apartment by the Mill River, it explores the conflict between freedom and domesticity, reflected in the natural world.   She has written for the Boston Globe, Seattle Times, Science News and Detroit Free Press, appeared in literary magazines including The Cape Rock, Pirene’s Fountain and the Naugatuck River Review, and contributes a monthly environment column to the Daily Hampshire Gazette. She teaches at Smith College with a focus on science and nature writing. She is the Writer in Residence at Forbes Library.