Environmental Poetry in the Time of Climate Crisis
If you’re on the waitlist or simply can’t make it to the event, we invite you to join us virtually as we live stream the 1:30 PM poetry & prose readings and the 4:00 PM panel discussion. If the video is not playing for you, try refreshing the page.
A Sundog Poetry symposium on ecopoetics
Join us as we explore the necessary intersection between two vital workshops of the intellect and imagination: poetry and science. We live in a time of climate crisis and mass extinction, a time that is both impossible to comprehend and difficult to discuss. It is with this in mind that we have gathered significant voices in the fields of environmental science and poetry, Alison Hawthorne Deming, John Elder, Jody Gladding, Jane Hirshfield, and Nalini Nadkarni, for an afternoon of critical conversation. By bringing together poets and scientists, we will demonstrate how the humanities can help translate scientific understanding into cultural meaning and moral imperative. We need every tool at our disposal to face what we must face and continue a conversation that builds community and leads to meaningful action.
This event, held at the Champlain Room at Champlain College on Friday, October 3, 2025, will include a moderated panel discussion, a poetry and prose reading, and programming for college and high school students. We aim to explore how the mutual powers of poetry and science can connect us to the environment, to our obligations to the earth and to the future.
Friday, Oct. 3rd • 1:30 PM - 5:30 PM
SOLD OUT
The Champlain Room at Champlain College
Hauke Family Campus Center, 375 Maple St., Burlington, VT
1:00 PM: Doors
1:30 - 3:00 PM: Poetry and Prose Readings
3:00 - 4:00 PM: Refreshments, Book Sales and Signings
4:00 - 5:30 PM: Panel Discussion
5:30-6:00 PM: Final Call for Book Sales and Signings
Presenters
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Alison Hawthorne Deming
Poet, essayist, and editor Alison Hawthorne Deming, recipient of fellowships from Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and Borchard Center for Literary Arts, has published six books of poetry and five books of nonfiction. Two new books are out in 2025: the poetry collection Blue Flax & Yellow Mustard Flower (Red Hen Press) and the anthology The Gift of Animals: Poems of Love, Loss, & Connection (Storey Press). She co-edited with Lauret E. Savoy the anthology The Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity, and the Natural World. She served as Poet-in-Residence at the Jacksonville Zoo and Gardens for the Language of Conservation; and the Milwaukee Public Museum and Milwaukee Public Library for Field Work, both projects sponsored by Poet’s House. Her other awards include fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, and the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. She is former Agnese Nelms Haury Chair in Environment and Social Justice and former Director of the UA Poetry Center. Currently she is Regents Professor Emerita at the University of Arizona. She lives in Tucson, Arizona and Grand Manan, New Brunswick, Canada.
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John Elder
The Thoreauvian lineage of nature writing and the poetry of earth from Romanticism to the present were central to John Elder's teaching at Middlebury College. His last four books each incorporate discussion of poetry and descriptions of the Vermont landscape into a framework of personal narrative. A Guggenheim Fellowship has supported this unfolding project. Since retiring from Middlebury John has become keenly interested in the pertinence of both classical Chinese poetry and the I Ching to the challenges of climate change.
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Jody Gladding
Jody Gladding is a poet and translator, with five books of poems and forty translations from French by authors such as Marie-Claire Bancquart, Roland Barthes, Jean Giono, and Julia Kristeva. Her most recent poetry collection, I entered without words, appeared in 2022 in the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets. Her awards include MacDowell and Stegner Fellowships, French-American Foundation Translation Prize, Whiting Writers’ Award, and Yale Younger Poets Prize. She taught in the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA program and directed writing at the Vermont Studio Center. She lives and works in East Calais, Vermont.
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Jane Hirshfield
Jane Hirshfield, writing “some of the most important poetry in the world today” (The New York Times Magazine), is among American poetry's central spokespersons for concerns of the biosphere. A former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and the founder of Poets For Science, a partner in the 2017 March for Science in Washington, D.C., Hirshfield’s most recent book is The Asking: New & Selected Poems (Knopf, 2023). Her honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, the Poetry Center Book Award, the California Book Award, Columbia University’s Translation Center Award, ten selections in The Best American Poems, and Beijing University’s Zhongkun International Poet Prize. She is also the author of two now-classic collections of essays on poetry's deep infrastructure and craft, Nine Gates and Ten Windows, and editor and co-translator of four books presenting the work of world poets from the deep past. Her work appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, The TLS, Poetry, Orion, The Plant-Human Quarterly, and Scientific American, and has been translated into eighteen languages. In 2019, she was elected into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
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Nalini M. Nadkarni
Nalini Nadkarni’s unique academic career interweaves her scientific research on rainforest canopy biota with innovative public engagement. She has written 150 scientific papers and three scholarly books on forest canopy-dwelling communities, supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Geographic Society. She also engages with those who do not or cannot gain access to science education, including faith-based groups, artists, corporations, and people who are incarcerated. Her work is featured in journals ranging from Science to Playboy, and in public media such as Science Friday, Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me, and RadioLab. She writes and hosts a weekly NPR radio program on the wonder of trees, called TreeNote. In 2023, the National Geographic Society named her as one of their ten “Explorers at Large.” Her awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the AAAS Award for Public Engagement, the National Science Foundation Award for Public Service, The Rachel Carson Award for Conservation, The Wilson Award for the Advancement of Social Justice, and the Archie Carr Medal for Conservation.
FAQs
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Environmental Poetry in the Time of Climate Crisis is free to attend. A suggested donation of $25 is welcome; your support makes these kinds of programs possible and helps us meet the costs of producing it.
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The event will be held in the Champlain Room in the Communication & Creative Media (CCM) building located at 375 Maple Street. Event parking and Champlain’s free shuttle service will be located at Champlain College's large parking lot at 175 Lakeside Avenue, where the Miller Center is located.
Just in front of the Miller Center is where the shuttle stop is located, where guests can access Champlain’s free shuttle service for a 10-minute ride to the CCM building at 375 Maple Street. The shuttle location can be tracked in real time at shuttle.champlain.edu. Guests will be dropped off at the doors to the first floor of the CCM building (this is also the shuttle stop for returning to the Lakeside lot), and the Champlain Room will be on the third floor, accessible by the elevator and stairs on the first floor. Please note that the shuttle is not wheelchair accessible. Please see below for direct drop-off instructions for ADA access.
The shuttle is on a continuous 20-minute loop and services the following locations:
-Miller Center at 175 Lakeside Avenue (event parking location)
-194 Saint Paul Street
-CCM building at 375 Maple Street (event location)
You will find the full shuttle schedule here.
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Phoenix Books will be on-site with multiple titles from all 5 presenters. There will be ample time during the intermission and after the event to have books signed by the authors.
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Our partners at the Media Factory will be recording and live streaming the event. Have questions about the live stream or recording? Contact us.