Virtual STEM Poetry Series

Tues., Apr. 25 2023, 6:30PM-8:00PM EST
Poets: Andrea Fry & Jan Conn
Recording: https://youtu.be/Ubu1vhmEKPE 

Andrea L. Fry was born in Dallas, raised mainly in New York City and the Catskill Mountains, and educated at Union College and Columbia University. She published her first collection of poems, The Bottle Diggers, in May 2017 (Turning Point Press). Her second collection Poisons & Antidotes followed in August 2021 (Deerbrook Editions). She has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize. She was a finalist in Georgia College’s Arts & Letters Prize contest, a semi-finalist in the Gulf Coast Prize in Poetry, and a semi-finalist in River Styx International Poetry Contest. Her poems have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Annals of Internal Medicine, Barrow Street, Chiron Review, Cimarron Review, The Comstock Review, The Lake, Spoon River Poetry Review, Stanford Literary Review, St. Petersburg Review, Women’s Review of Books, Writers Resist and others. Andrea is an oncology nurse practitioner at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. www.andrealfry.com 

Jan Conn is a biologist, poet and painter. She studies the ecology and evolution of Amazonian mosquitoes that transmit the malaria parasite as a Research Scientist at the Wadsworth Center, NYSDOH and a Professor of Biomedical Sciences at SUNY-Albany. She combines field and lab studies to gain deeper insights into the environmental factors that influence mosquito behavior. In her latest book, Peony Vertigo (Brick Books, fall, 2023), her poems interface with STEM via climate, landscape, and grief. She imagines herself a peony, a salamander, a fish, and an ancient cave painting; she engages the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector about drought and species loss, she imagines the supercollider contending with a sock, and she questions the world of AI. Jaguar Rain (Brick Books, 2006), focused on the ecological interdependence of everything in the Amazonian landscape through the eyes of the notable explorer and artist Margaret Mee. Her paintings range from those that render the turbulence of climate devastation, forest fires, and disappearing aquifers, to the vibrant tranquility of Japanese landscapes.

Tues., Mar. 28, 2023, 6:30PM-8:00PM EST
Poets: Laurel Anderson & Charlotte Pence
Recording: https://youtu.be/hJuoU45Lb20 

Laurel Anderson is a plant ecologist and poet. Her poetry has appeared in Terrain.org (semi-finalist in the 12th Annual Poetry Contest), EcoTheo Review, Radar Poetry, River Mouth Review, The Fourth River, Split Rock Review and elsewhere. Laurel teaches science at Ohio Wesleyan University and lives with her family in central Ohio, USA.

Charlotte Pence’s new book of poems, Code, received the 2020 Book of the Year award from Alabama Poetry Society and was a finalist for Foreword Reviews Indie Poetry Book of 2020. Code details not only the life cycle of birth and death, but also the means of this cycle: DNA itself. Her first book of poems, Many Small Fires (Black Lawrence Press, 2015), won Foreword Reviews’ silver medal award in poetry. Both poetry books weave together personal experience and scientific exploration. She is also the author of two award-winning poetry chapbooks and the editor of The Poetics of American Song Lyrics. Her poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction have recently been published in Harvard Review, Poetry, Sewanee Review, Southern Review, and Brevity. A graduate of Emerson College (MFA) and the University of Tennessee (PhD), she is now the director of the Stokes Center for Creative Writing at University of South Alabama.

Tues., Feb. 21, 2023, 6:30PM-8:00PM EST
Poets: Betsy Aoki & Rebecca A. Durham
Recording: https://youtu.be/GVftwNTt9gQ 

Elizabeth (Betsy) Aoki is a poet, short story writer and game producer. Her first poetry collection, Breakpoint, was a National Poetry Series Finalist and received the Patricia Bibby First Book Award. Its signature poem, "Slouching like a velvet rope," was selected by Pulitzer Prize winner Jericho Brown as the winner of the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize. Aoki has received grants and fellowships from the City of Seattle, Artist Trust Foundation, Jackstraw Writers Program, Clarion West Writers Workshop and Hedgebrook. She currently serves as an assistant poetry editor at terrain.org and on the board of the Clarion West Writers Workshop. To find out more her writing, go to betsyaoki.com or follow her on twitter at @baoki.

Poet, botanist, and artist Rebecca A. Durham is the author of two award-winning poetry books, Half-Life of Empathy (New Rivers Press, 2020) and Loss/Less (Shanti Arts, 2022). Originally from New England, she now lives in Montana where she works as botanist. She holds a BA in Biology from Colby College, an MS in Botany from Oregon State University, and an MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from the University of Montana. A PhD candidate in Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Montana, Rebecca is examining the intersection between poetry and science. Find more of her work at rebeccadurham.net

Mon., Dec. 5, 2022 6:30PM-8:00PM EST
Poets: Jessica Reed & Lucille Lang Day
Recording: https://youtu.be/Y94HPdxTgLE 

Jessica Reed’s chapbooks include Still Recognizable Forms (Laurel Review Greentower Press) and World, Composed (Finishing Line Press, finalist for the Etchings Press Whirling Prize). Her work has appeared in Conjunctions, Chicago Review, Crazyhorse, Quarterly West, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Bellingham Review, New American Writing, Inverted Syntax, Waxwing, DIAGRAM, [PANK], Scientific American, The Journal, Laurel Review, Exposition Review, North American Review, The Indianapolis Review, and elsewhere. She has an MFA in poetry and a BS in physics, and she teaches a university seminar on physics and the arts. She lives in Indiana with her husband and chickens. https://www.jessicareed.info/  @jreedscipoet.

Lucille Lang Day is the author of four poetry chapbooks and seven full-length poetry collections, including Birds of San Pancho and Other Poems of Place and Becoming an Ancestor. She has also edited the anthology Poetry and Science: Writing Our Way to Discovery, co-edited Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California and Red Indian Road West: Native American Poetry from California, and published two children’s books and a memoir, Married at Fourteen: A True Story. Her many honors include the Blue Light Poetry Prize, two Josephine Miles – PEN Oakland Literary Awards, the Joseph Henry Jackson Award in Literature, and eleven Pushcart Prize nominations. The founder and publisher of a small press, Scarlet Tanager Books, she received her MA in English and MFA in creative writing at San Francisco State University, and her BA in biological sciences, MA in zoology, and PhD in science/mathematics education at the University of California, Berkeley. https://lucillelangday.com.

Tues., Nov. 29, 2022, 6:30PM-8:00PM EST
Poets: Neil Aitken & Jenny Qi
Recording: https://youtu.be/SxtajXnn8RE 

Neil Aitken is the author of two books of poetry, Babbage’s Dream (Sundress Publications, 2017), a semi-finalist for the Anthony Hecht Prize, and The Lost Country of Sight (Anhinga Press, 2008), winner of the Philip Levine Prize. A former computer games programmer with an undergraduate degree in computer science, Neil left the programming field in 2004 to pursue creative writing and teaching. He holds both a multi-genre MFA in Creative Writing from UC Riverside and a PhD in Literature & Creative Writing from the University of Southern California. He is the founding editor of Boxcar Poetry Review and his own poems have appeared in The Adroit Journal, American Literary Review, Crab Orchard Review, Hyphen Magazine, Ninth Letter, and have also been anthologized, set to music, and used for voiceover narration in an animated short. In addition to writing poetry, he also works on literary translations of contemporary Chinese poetry and writes interactive fiction games in Twine. A past Kundiman Poetry Fellow, he also has served as the Virtual Writer-in-Residence for the Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild and as Writer-in-Residence for the Regina Public Library. He presently lives in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada where he works as an online creative writing coach and manuscript editor. Visit him online at www.neil-aitken.com.

Jenny Qi is the author of Focal Point, winner of the 2020 Steel Toe Books Poetry Award. Her essays and poems have been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships and support from Tin House, Omnidawn, Kearny Street Workshop, the San Francisco Writers Grotto, the Brown Handler Residency, and the San Francisco Foundation/Nomadic Press. Born in Pennsylvania to Chinese immigrants, she grew up mostly in Las Vegas and now lives in San Francisco, where she completed her Ph.D. in Cancer Biology.