Tuesday, April 20, 2021
10–11 am CDT
Online on Zoom
We are collaborating with Press Play exhibiting poet Megan Kaminski to host an online workshop for children aged 7-10. Be an Animal is a workshop that will look to our animal kin for inspiration. We'll explore other ways of seeing, being, and inhabiting this world as a point for opening our creative potential. We'll learn lots from our more-than-human friends, discover new things about ourselves, and write some poems. To participate in this workshop, register for free on Eventbrite.
A Zoom link will be emailed to registered attendees two hours before the event start time. For more information, email tarbleprograms@eiu.edu.
This workshop is part of the National Endowment for the Arts Big Read programming. The NEA Big Read is designed to broaden our understanding of our world, our communities, and ourselves through the joy of sharing a good book: An American Sunrise by U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo.
Megan Kaminski is a poet and essayist—and the author of three books of poetry, Deep City, Desiring Map, and a new book, Gentlewomen (Noemi Press 2020), that explores care, trauma, and resilience as well as our estrangement from the natural world and from ourselves through the conceit of a trio of allegorical sisters. Her current public-facing work, in the form of the prairie divination deck and the Ad Astra Project, focuses on helping people connect to their own ecosystems as a source of knowledge and inspiration for strategies to live in their world, to grieve and heal after loss, and to re-align their thinking towards kinship, community, and sustainability. An Associate Professor in English and Co-Director of the Global Grasslands CoLABorative at the University of Kansas, she specializes in poetry and poetics, queer ecology, somatics, and the environmental humanities. Her work is informed by interdisciplinary research in social welfare, evolutionary biology, and philosophy, as well as previous work in the healing arts and at non-profit environmental organizations.
