Program Information
Week 2 :: Emergent Ecologies: Ritual / Ecopoetics / Artistic Intelligences
Week 2 Schedule
Workshops begin at 9:30 am and end at Noon.
Afternoon and evening events will be held in the Performing Arts Center on Naropa University’s Arapahoe Campus, unless otherwise noted.
Schedule is subject to change.
Monday, 6/8
1:00–2:30 PM :: Opening Panel:
Panelists: Anne Waldman (chair):
3:00–4:00 PM :: MFA Lecture
Tuesday, 6/9
1:00–2:00 PM :: Artist Talk ::
2:30–4:00 PM :: Artist Talk ::
7:00–9:30 PM :: Faculty Reading ::
Wednesday, 6/10
1:00–3:00 PM :: Dharma Arts ::
7:00–9:30 PM :: SWP PRIVATE EVENT ::
Thursday, 6/11
1:00–2:30 PM :: Artist Talk ::
3:00–4:00 PM :: Lecture ::
4:00–5:30 PM :: Student Panel
7:00–9:30 PM :: Faculty Reading::
Friday, 6/12
1:00–2:30 PM :: Artist Talk ::
3:00–4:00 PM :: Colloquium
7:00–9:30 PM :: Student Reading
Saturday, 6/13
7:00–9:30 PM :: Faculty Reading::
Workshop Faculty for Week 2
Anne Waldman :: Workshop
[workshop description forthcoming]
Anne Waldman is the author most recently of Rues du Monde, English and French (Apic Press, Algeria 2024), Bard, Kinetic (Coffee House 2023), a memoir with poetry, essays, interviews, Para Ser Estrella a Medianoche, English and Spanish, (Arrebato Libros, Madrid 2021) and co-editor with Emma Gomis of New Weathers: Poetics from the Naropa Archive (Nightboat 2022). Her most recent book from Penguin is Trickster Feminism, and forthcoming: Mesopotopia (2025).
The Grammy-nominated William S. Burroughs-inspired opera and movie, Black Lodge, with music by David T. Little and libretto by Waldman, premiered at Opera Philadelphia in 2022. Patti Smith has called Waldman’s album SCIAMACHY with cover and interior art by Pat Steir, 2020: “Exquisitely potent, a psychic shield for our times.”
She was arrested at Rocky Flats with Daniel Ellsberg and Allen Ginsberg in the 1970s, reading poems that challenged deliveries of plutonium for the manufacturing of pits for nuclear warheads. Waldman has published over 60 books of poetry, including the 1,000 page feminist epic: The Iovis Trilogy: Colors The Mechanism of Concealment which won the PEN Center Literary Award for Poetry.
She was awarded the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation for Lifetime Achievement in 2015. Waldman is one of the founders and a former Director of The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church In-the-Bowery and a founder of the Kerouac School at Naropa University in Boulder, CO where she is the Artistic Director of the annual Summer Writing Program.
Selah Saterstrom + Kristen Nelson :: Workshop
[workshop description forthcoming]
Selah Saterstrom is the author of five books: Rancher, Ideal Suggestions: Essays in Divinatory Poetics, Slab, The Meat and Spirit Plan, and The Pink Institution. She teaches and lectures across the United States, and now makes her home in the Pacific Northwest.
Kristen E. Nelson is a queer writer, scholar, and performer. She is the author of In the Away Time, the length of this gap, sometimes I gets lost and is grateful for noises in the dark, and Write, Dad. Her recent writing can be found in The Georgia Review, Feminist Studies Journal, and Working Titles. Kristen is the co-founder of Four Queens, a platform for divinatory poetics with Selah Saterstrom and is a Ph.D. candidate at UC Santa Cruz in Literature, creative/critical writing. Her research centers on Creative Writing, Feminist Autotheory, and Witchcraft Studies.
Karla Kelsey :: Workshop
[workshop description forthcoming]
Karla Kelsey is a poet and essayist whose work weaves together the lyric with philosophy and history. Her poetry books include On Certainty (Omnidawn, 2023), Blood Feather (Tupelo Press, 2020), A Conjoined Book (Omnidawn, 2014), Iteration Nets (Ahsahta, 2010), and Knowledge, Forms, the Aviary (Ahsahta, 2006) selected by Carolyn Forché for the Sawtooth Poetry Prize. Her book of experimental essays, Of Sphere, was selected by Carla Harryman for the 2016 Essay Press Prize and was published in 2017. She is the editor of Lost Writings: Two Novels by Mina Loy, (Yale University Press in 2024). Her poet’s novel, Transcendental Factory: For Mina Loy was recently released from Winter Editions.
Poems and prose have been published by such journals as Bomb, Fence, Conjunctions, New American Writing, The Boston Review, Verse, and Tupelo Quarterly. Her critical essays on poetry, poetics, and pedagogy have appeared in anthologies and literary journals.
From 2010-2017 she edited Constant Critic, Fence Books’ online journal of poetry reviews. She currently co-publishes with Aaron McCollough SplitLevel Texts, a press specializing in hybrid genre projects. With Poupeh Missaghi she edited the first volume of Matters of Feminist Practice, a journal of feminist criticism published by Belladonna* Collaborative. An H.D. Fellow at Yale University’s Beinecke Library and the recipient of a Fulbright Scholars grant, she has taught in Budapest, Hungary, and is the Charles B. Degenstein Professor of English and Creative Writing at Susquehanna University.
Joyelle McSweeney :: Workshop
[workshop description forthcoming]
Guggenheim Fellow Joyelle McSweeney is the author of ten books of poetry, drama and prose, a well-known critic, and an advocate for international literature in translation. McSweeney’s latest book, Death Styles, appeared from Nightboat Books in Spring 2024; her previous title, Toxicon and Arachne (2020), was called “frightening and brilliant” by Dan Chiasson in the New Yorker and earned her the Shelley Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America. Her other books include the essay collection, The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults, a work of decadent ecopoetics, and the verse play, Dead Youth, or the Leaks, which inaugurated the Leslie Scalapino Prize for Innovative Women Performance Artists in 2014. With Johannes Göransson, she co-edits the international press Action Books which has built readerships for a diverse array of US and international authors from Kim Hyesoon and Don Mee Choi to Daniel Borzutzky and Raúl Zurita. She lives in South Bend, Indiana and teaches at the University of Notre Dame.
Julia Seko :: Workshop (Letter Press)
[workshop description forthcoming]
Julia Seko, letterpress printer, book artist, and proprietor of P.S. Press, is longtime adjunct faculty in the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics where she teaches letterpress studio courses. She co-founded the Book Arts League, a local nonprofit letterpress and book arts organization, and is a central figure in the Harry Smith Printshop at Naropa University.
Kazim Ali :: Dharma Art :: Embodied Practice and Writing
Kazim Ali was born in the United Kingdom and has lived transnationally in the United States, Canada, India, France, and the Middle East. His most recent book is Sukun: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 2023). His books encompass multiple genres, including the volumes of poetry The Voice of Sheila Chandra (Alice James Books, 2020), Inquisition (Wesleyan University Press, 2018) All One’s Blue (HarperCollins India, 2016) Sky Ward (Wesleyan University Press, 2012) winner of the Ohioana Book Award in Poetry; The Fortieth Day (BOA Editions, 2008); The Far Mosque (Alice James Books, 2005) winner of Alice James Books’ New England/New York Award; and the cross-genre texts Bright Felon (Wesleyan University Press, 2009) and Wind Instrument (Spork Press, 2014). His most recent book is Northern Light: Power, Land and the Memory of Water (Milkweed Editions, 2021), which Literary Hub called “A balm for the soul.” His novels include The Secret Room: A String Quartet (Kaya Press, 2017) and among his books of essays are the hybrid memoir Silver Road: Essays, Maps & Calligraphies (Tupelo Press, 2018) and Fasting for Ramadan: Notes from a Spiritual Practice (Tupelo Press, 2011). He is also an accomplished translator of Marguerite Duras, Sohrab Sepehri, Ananda Devi, Mahmoud Chokrollahi and others, and an editor of several anthologies and books of criticism.
MFA Lecture ::
TBA
Special Guest :: Juliana Spahr
Juliana Spahr’s most recent book, _Ars Poeticas_, is a collection of lyric meditations on writing poetry in a time of ecological crisis and right wing populism. _Crowd Control: The Racial Ordering of Literary Reward_, cowritten with Claire Grossman and Stephanie Young is forthcoming from Columbia U P.
Special Guest :: Alan Gilbert
Alan Gilbert is a poet, essayist, and art writer. He is the author of four books of poetry, including the ongoing epic poem, The Everyday Life of Design. Gilbert is also the author of a collection of essays, articles, and reviews entitled Another Future: Poetry and Art in a Postmodern Twilight. He is the recipient of a 2019 Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, a 2009 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, and a 2006 Creative Capital Foundation Award for Innovative Literature. He is the website editor for BOMB Magazine and Adjunct Associate Professor in the Columbia University MFA Writing Program.
Special Guest :: Johannes Göransson
Johannes Göransson is the author of ten books of poetry, including Summer and the forthcoming book The Adorations, as well as the critical book Transgressive Circulation. He has translated such poets as Ann Jäderlund, Aase Berg and Helena Boberg. He edits Action Books and the Notre Dame Review.
Harry Smith Recording Studio
Ambrose Bye is a musician, engineer, and producer living in Mexico City, and is the co-founder of Fast Speaking Music with Anne Waldman. He has produced over 20 albums and frequently collaborates with poets. Recent productions include “Among the Poetry Stricken” (Clark Coolidge and Thurston Moore) and “Artificial Happiness Button” (Heroes are Gang Leaders). He has worked and performed at Masnaa and the Ecole de la Literature in Casablanca, Le Maison de Poesie in Paris, the fieEstival Maelstrom in Brussels, the Henry Miller Library in Big Sur, Pathway to Paris at Montreal POP 2015, and Casa Del Lago in Mexico City. He has also been involved in the recording studio and workshops at the Summer Writing Program at Naropa University since 2009.
Fast Speaking Music
