[AWP Offsite] Voices of the Anthropocene: An Ecopoetry Reading

How should we live and make meaning during the current era of the Anthropocene, in which we are called to witness and respond to human-caused climate change?

Voices of the Anthropocene features readings from award-winning poets across four different geographical regions: Hila Ratzabi, Claire Wahmanholm, Brittney Corrigan, Angela Voras-Hills and Sean Hill. The poets and their work invite us to deepen our personal connection to the reality of the climate crisis and heighten our awareness of the fragile environment around us.

Hila Ratzabi is the author of the poetry collection There Are Still Woods (June Road Press, 2022). Her poetry has been published in Narrative, Linebreak, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Adroit Journal, and other journals, and in The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry and Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology. She was editor-in-chief and poetry editor of Storyscape (2011–2017) and holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. She is Director of Virtual Content & Programs at Ritualwell.org and lives in Oak Park, Illinois.

Claire Wahmanholm received her BA from UW-Madison, her MFA from the Writing Seminars at the Johns Hopkins University, and her PhD from the University of Utah. Her chapbook, Night Vision, won the 2017 New Michigan Press/DIAGRAM chapbook contest. Her debut full-length collection, Wilder (Milkweed Editions), won the 2018 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry, the Society of Midland Authors Award for Poetry, and was a finalist for the 2019 Minnesota Book Award. Her second collection, Redmouth, was published with Tinderbox Editions in 2019. Her third collection, Meltwater, is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in 2023. A 2020-2021 McKnight Writing Fellow, her poems have most recently appeared in, or are forthcoming from, TriQuarterly, Ninth Letter, Blackbird, Washington Square Review, Copper Nickel, Beloit Poetry Journal, Grist, RHINO, The Los Angeles Review, Fairy Tale Review, Bennington Review, DIAGRAM, The Journal, and The Kenyon Review Online, and have been featured by the Academy of American Poets. She lives in the Twin Cities.

Brittney Corrigan is the author of the poetry collections Breaking, Navigation, 40 Weeks, and most recently, Daughters, a series of persona poems in the voices of daughters of various characters from folklore, mythology, and popular culture. Solastalgia, a collection of poems exploring climate change, extinction, and the Anthropocene age, is forthcoming from JackLeg Press in 2023. Brittney was raised in Colorado and has lived in Portland, Oregon for the past three decades, where she is an alumna and employee of Reed College. She is currently at work on her first short story collection.

Poet, community organizer, and instructor Angela Voras-Hills grew up in Wisconsin. She earned an MFA from the University of Massachusetts Boston. She is the author of the poetry collection Louder Birds (Pleiades, 2020), selected by Traci Brimhall for the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize. Voras-Hills has received grants from the Sustainable Arts Foundation and Key West Literary Seminar as well as a fellowship from the Writers’ Room of Boston. She cofounded The Watershed: A Place for Writers, a literary arts organization, which evolved into Arts + Literature Laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin. She lives with her family in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Sean Hill is the author of two poetry collections, Dangerous Goods (Milkweed Editions, 2014), awarded the Minnesota Book Award in Poetry, and Blood Ties & Brown Liquor (UGA Press, 2008), named one of the Ten Books All Georgians Should Read in 2015 by the Georgia Center for the Book. Hill has received numerous awards, including fellowships from the Cave Canem Foundation, the Bush Foundation, Stanford University, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Hill’s poems and essays have appeared in Callaloo, Harvard Review, New England Review, Orion, Oxford American, Poetry, Tin House, and numerous other journals, and in over two dozen anthologies including Black Nature and Villanelles. And a volume of poems selected from Blood Ties & Brown Liquor and Dangerous Goods has been translated and published in Korean. Hill lives in southwestern Montana with his family and is a professor of creative writing at the University of Montana.