ECO LIT: Readings from Paperbark magazine and The Massachusetts Review 

Saturday, March 26, 2022 | 1 p.m. Augusta Savage Gallery
Free event | Register here

Paperbark , a collaborative and interdisciplinary magazine shepherded by students, faculty, and staff across the University of Massachusetts Amherst campus, publishes criticism, art, poetry, and prose engaged with the environmental humanities. Paperbark will celebrate the launch of Issue 03 in conjunction with the publication of The Massachusetts Review's climate issue.

Recent contributors to each magazine will read from their work: poetry and prose that shed light on ecologies in crisis. We'll open the floor to questions from the audience following the reading. 

Artwork above by Michelle Samour

Reader Participants

Emmalie Dropkin is a fiction writer, teacher, and activist. Her work blends speculative and literary traditions to explore human responses to the climate emergency and has appeared in The Massachusetts Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Electric Lit, and the Kaaterskill Basin Literary Journal. Emmalie is coeditor of Strange Attractors: Lives Changed by Chance, released in 2019 by the University of Massachusetts Press. She has taught creative writing and composition through the lens of the environmental humanities, and she serves as a VIDA gender count coordinator for VIDA: Women in Literary Arts and a coordinator for Extinction Rebellion Western Massachusetts.

A member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, Santee Frazier earned a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA from Syracuse University. His first collection of poems, Dark Thirty (2009), was published in the Sun Tracks series of the University of Arizona Press. Frazier’s honors include a Fall 2009 Lannan Residency Fellowship and 2011 School for Advanced Research Indigenous Writer in Residence, and was the 2014 Native Arts and Culture Foundation literature fellow. His second collection of poems, Aurum, was released in 2019 by The University of Arizona Press.

H. J. Gardner is a translator from Catalan. She is a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, where she studied at the Universitat de Barcelona. Her previous collaborations with Marta Buchaca include the short play Summit, directed by Neil LaBute, which appeared at La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theatre in New York City in 2017. She wishes to thank the Institut Ramon Llull and Sala Beckett-Obrador Internacional de Dramatúrgia in Barcelona for their continued support of theater in translation. She is currently working on a translation of the play Euphoria by Lara Díez Quintanilla, and a new work by Esteve Soler for the Urania Theatre in Cologne, Germany. Her translation of Before the German's Here by Marta Barceló was the winner of the Plays in Translation contest for the American Literary Translators Association in 2021.

Shailja Patel is the author of Migritude, which was a #1 Amazon poetry bestseller, Seattle Times bestseller, and shortlisted for Italy's Camaiore Prize. Migritude is based on Patel's highly-acclaimed one-woman theater show, which generated standing ovations on four continents. Patel's poems have been translated into seventeen languages. Her essays and commentaries appear in the Guardian, Le Monde Diplomatique, and Internazionale, among others. She has appeared on BBC, Al-Jazeera, and NPR. Patel is a founding member of Kenyans For Peace, Truth and Justice, a civil society coalition that works for an equitable democracy in Kenya. The African Women's Development Fund named her one of Fifty Inspirational African Feminists, ELLE India Magazine selected her as one of its 25 New Guard Influencers, and Poetry Africa honored her as Letters To Dennis Poet, continuing the legacy of renowned anti-apartheid activist poet Dennis Brutus. She represented Kenya at the London Cultural Olympiad's Poetry Parnassus. Her work currently features in the Smithsonian Museum's groundbreaking "Beyond Bollywood" exhibition. The Nobel Women’s Initiative honored Patel with a Global Feminist Spotlight in 2019. She is currently a Civitella Ranieri 2021-23 fellow, and a research associate at Five College Women’s Studies Research Center, working on African feminisms and climate justice.

Ashley Eliza Williams is an artist and amateur ecologist exploring new ways of interacting with nature and with each other. She has been an artist-in-residence at Vermont Studio Center, MASS MoCA, Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, and many other places. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally. Williams has taught at the University of Colorado and Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. She is a member of the research-based art collective Sprechgesang Institute and currently lives in western Massachusetts.