How does language shape our relationship with nature and with each other? What is poetry’s role in the future of our planet?

Join Literary Cleveland and Orion Magazine at the Nature Center at Shaker Lakes for a literary reading and conversation between Orion contributor Jill Bialosky, editor at Norton and author of Asylum and The Deceptions, and Lindsay Turner, CWRU professor and author of the poetry collection The Upstate. Together, they will explore how poetry engages the natural world, reveals our interconnectedness as human animals, and challenges us to address ecological crises.

Books will be available at the event courtesy of Mac’s Backs-Books on Coventry. This event is sponsored by Orion Magazine in partnership with the Nature Center.

Lindsay Turner is a poet, critic, and French-to-English translator. She's the author of two books of poems: Songs & Ballads and The Upstate (University of Chicago Press). Her poems and translations appear in Harper's, The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. Originally from northeast Tennessee, she now teaches at Case Western Reserve University and lives in Cleveland.

Jill Bialosky's newest volume of poetry Asylum: A Personal, Historical, Natural Inquiry in 103 Lyric Sections, was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. She is the author of five acclaimed collections of poetry, four critically acclaimed novels, including The Prize and The Deceptions and a two memoirs, Poetry Will Save Your Life and New York Times bestselling memoir History of a Suicide: My Sister’s Unfinished Life. Her poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, O Magazine, The Kenyon Review, Harvard Review, Paris Review and Best American Poetry among others. She co-edited with Helen Schulman the anthology, Wanting a Child. She is an Executive Editor and Vice President at W. W. Norton & Company. In 2014 she was honored by the Poetry Society of America for her distinguished contribution to poetry.

Nature Is a Language: A Reading with Jill Bialosky and Lindsay Turner

with Orion Magazine, Literary Cleveland, and Macs Backs