“Every Struggle is an Ecological Struggle”: Towards a Radical Arts Activism

What can we learn from Beyonce, a mushroom, the human body, and an art exhibition?  How do we “read the world” and learn to write alongside it?  In this free workshop, artists and writers are invited to radically imagine a new arts activism that draws on multiple ways of knowing, lineages, histories, and interrelationship between the natural world and an artistic expression of balance and connection.  Together we will explore ekphrasis, writing in response to art, in relationship to works of art collected in A NonHuman Horizon that help illuminate the relationship between environmental politics, anthropocentric thinking, and racialized experience. This workshop will be led by award-winning poet Raina León, and focus on California poets to conduct the workshop. We will reference the work of Aurora Levins Morales, Camille Dungy, Barbara Jane Reyes, among others, that will lead us into observation, discussion, creation, and a community project.

Raina J. León, a Cave Canem graduate fellow (2006) and member of the Carolina Afri-can-American Writers Collective, has published over 50 publications in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and academic scholarship. Her first collection of poetry, Canticle of Idols
(2008), was a finalist for both the Cave Canem First Book Poetry Prize (2005) and the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize (2006). Her second book, Boogeyman Dawn (2013), was a finalist for the Naomi Long Madgett Prize (2010). Her third book, sombra: dis(locate) was released February 2016, Salmon Poetry. Her first chapbook, profeta without refuge, was released in September 2016 through Nomadic Press.