Name: Poetry of Insects and Interconnection
Start: 2024-05-25T19:00:00-05:00
Location: Arts + Literature Laboratory

Join us on Saturday, May 25, at 7:00 PM as poets Brenda Cardenas, Nickole Brown, Catherine Jagoe, and Heather Swan read poems celebrating some of the smallest creatures in our ecosystem and illuminating how we are all deeply interconnected...humans, frogs, birds, and fungi. Cardenas, Brown (who will be joining through Zoom), and Jagoe are featured in Swan's new nonfiction book Where the Grass Still Sings: Stories of Insects and Interconnection. In the Project Space, enjoy the insect artworks by John Hitchcock, Jenny Angus, Tilly Woodward, and Lea Bradovich.
Heather Swan's poems have appeared in such journals as Terrain, Minding Nature, Poet Lore, Phoebe, The Raleigh Review, The Hopper, Midwestern Gothic and Cold Mountain, and in many anthologies. Her nonfiction has appeared in Aeon, Belt, Catapult, Edge Effects, Emergence, ISLE, Minding Nature, and The Learned Pig. Her book Where Honeybees Thrive: Stories from the Field (Penn State Press) won the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award. She teaches environmental literature and writing in Madison, WI.
Brenda Cárdenas authored Trace (Red Hen Press), Boomerang (Bilingual Press) and three chapbooks. She also co-edited Resist Much/Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance and Between the Heart and the Land: Latina Poets in the Midwest. Her poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in many literary journals and anthologies, such as Poetry; Prairie Schooner, Braving the Body; Latinx Poetics: The Art of Poetry; TAB: Journal of Poetry and Poetics; and Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations. Cárdenas has served as Milwaukee’s Poet Laureate and currently teaches at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Nickole Brown is the author of Sister, first published in 2007 with a new edition reissued in 2018. Her second book, Fanny Says (BOA Editions), won the Weatherford Award for Appalachian Poetry in 2015. Currently, she teaches at the Sewanee School of Letters MFA Program and lives in Asheville, NC, where she volunteers at several different animal sanctuaries. Since 2016, she’s been writing about these animals. To Those Who Were Our First Gods, a chapbook of these first nine poems, won the 2018 Rattle Prize. She is the President of the Hellbender Gathering of Poets, an annual environmental literary festival set to launch in Black Mountain, NC, in October of 2025.
Catherine Jagoe is a writer and translator based in Madison. Her poems have been featured on The Writer’s Almanac and Poetry Daily and she is a semi-regular contributor to Wisconsin Public Radio’s Wisconsin Life series. Her previous poetry collections include Bloodroot, News from the North, and Casting Off, as well as three collections of Uruguayan poetry in translation. She is currently completing a memoir in essays. Her new volume of poems about the environment, Praying to the God of Small Things, is due out with Kelsay Books this summer.