Join us for a night of poetry cultivating our collective urge to grow, tend, and heal, and to launch Tess Taylor’s new poetry anthology Leaning Toward Light: Poems for Gardens & the Hands That Tend Them.
Alongside Ruben Quesada, Anna V.Q. Ross, Patty Crane, Ashley Jones, Hannah Fries, Sophie Cabot Black, Susan Nguyen, Ann Fisher-Wirth, and Jason Myers, Taylor invites readers, gardeners, caretakers, and stewards of the earth to a magical night in the Linda Hall Library to celebrate this beautiful collaboration with some of the most imaginative contemporary poets of our time.
About the book
Much like reading a good poem, caring for plants brings comfort, solace, and joy to many. In Leaning Toward Light, acclaimed poet and avid gardener Tess Taylor brings together a diverse range of contemporary voices to offer poems that celebrate our joyful connection to the natural world. Praised by the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, and Alice Waters, Leaning Toward Light is a rich and successful collection that speaks to our hunger to tend, grow and repair our relationships with the earth and one another.
Several of the most well-known contemporary writers and poetry’s rising stars, contribute to this collection- including Ross Gay, Jericho Brown, Mark Doty, Jane Hirshfield, Ada Limón, Danusha Laméris, Naomi Shihab Nye, Garrett Hongo, Ellen Bass, and James Crews. With a foreword by Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of the New York Times bestseller World of Wonders, Leaning Toward Light includes reflective pauses and sometimes whimsical recipes by the poets themselves.
In-person attendance option
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Tess Taylor lives in El Cerrito, California, where she raises artichokes on the sidewalk median strip, has four chickens in the backyard, and is working to restore a community orchard. Her body of work as a writer deals with place, ecology, memory and cultural reckoning.
She published five celebrated poetry collections: The Misremembered World, The Forage House, Last West: Roadsongs for Dorothea Lange, Work & Days, and Rift Zone and served as the on-air poetry reviewer for NPR’s All Things Considered for over a decade.
Her work as a cultural critic appears in Harper's Magazine, The Atlantic, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, Tin House, The Times Literary Supplement, CNN, and The New York Times. Her latest work, Leaning Toward Light: Poems for Gardens and the Hands that Tend Them, is a collection of contemporary gardening poems for an era of climate crisis, which includes poems by some of the most luminary poets writing today.
Poet, activist, sometime farmer, sometime teacher, Sophie Cabot Black is the author of three collections: The Misunderstanding of Nature, The Descent, and The Exchange. NPR called her “the poet’s poet,” her work was a “hot pick” on CNBC’s Topic A with Tina Brown, and from time to time can be seen in the pages of The New Yorker. She has won several awards and prizes, and currently divides her time between New England and New York City.
Patty Crane is the author of BELL I WAKE TO (Zone 3 Press First Book Award, 2019) and something flown (Concrete Wolf Chapbook Award, 2018), as well as the translator of THE BLUE HOUSE: Collected Works of Tomas Tranströmer (Copper Canyon Press, 2023) and BRIGHT SCYTHE (Sarabande Books, 2015), her selected translations of the Swedish Nobel laureate. Her poetry has appeared widely in journals, most recently in Bellevue Literary Review, Poetry Daily, Poetry East, and Vox. Her translations have recently appeared in American Poets, Poetry, Five Points, and Guernica. Her work has been supported by fellowships from MacDowell and Hedgebrook (forthcoming). A third generation Cape Cod native, she divides her time between the hilltowns of western Massachusetts and the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont.
Ann Fisher-Wirth’s seventh book of poems, Paradise is Jagged, appeared from Terrapin Books in February 2023. Her sixth book of poems is The Bones of Winter Birds (Terrapin Books, 2019). Her fifth book, Mississippi, is a poetry/photography collaboration with Delta photographer Maude Schuyler Clay (Wings Press, 2018). Her other books of poems are Dream Cabinet, Carta Marina, Blue Window, and Five Terraces, and the chapbooks The Trinket Poems, Walking Wu-Wei’s Scroll, and Slide Shows. With Laura-Gray Street she coedited The Ecopoetry Anthology, published by Trinity University Press early in 2013; a third edition appeared in January 2020. Ann and Laura-Gray have begun work on The Ecopoetry Anthology: Volume II, which will contain poems written since 2010 by poets who were not included in the first volume; it will appear from Trinity UP in 2025.
Hannah Fries is a poet, writer, and editor. She is the author of the poetry collection Little Terrarium as well as the book Being with Trees. She grew up in New Hampshire, went to Dartmouth College, and later got an MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson College. From 2005 to 2014, she worked as an editor—including poetry editor—at Orion magazine. Currently, she is a senior editor at Storey Publishing, an imprint of Workman. Her poetry and prose have appeared in such places as American Poetry Review, Massachusetts Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Terrain.org, and EcoTheo Review. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and she was awarded a scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference.
Ashley M. Jones is Poet Laureate of the state of Alabama (2022-2026). She received an MFA in Poetry from Florida International University (FIU), where she was a John S. and James L. Knight Foundation Fellow. Jones has been featured on news outlets including Good Morning America, ABC News, and the BBC. Her poems and essays appear or are forthcoming in many journals and anthologies, including CNN, the Academy of American Poets, POETRY, Tupelo Quarterly, Prelude, Steel Toe Review, Fjords Review, Quiet Lunch, Poets Respond to Race Anthology, Night Owl, The Harvard Journal of African American Public Policy, pluck!, and elsewhere.
She currently lives in Birmingham, Alabama, where she is Associate Director of the University Honors Program at UAB, founding director of the Magic City Poetry Festival, board member of the Alabama Writers Cooperative and the Alabama Writers
Jason Myers is the author of Maker of Heaven & (Belle Point Press, 2023) and A Place for the Genuine (Eerdmans, 2024). Myers is a National Poetry Series finalist and has published poetry and essays in The Believer, Image, Kenyon Review, Orion, The Paris Review, and numerous other magazines. His writing has been nominated for a Pushcart and Best New Poets and was introduced by Campbell McGrath as part of American Poet's Emerging Poets feature. He is co-Executive Director of EcoTheo Collective and Editor-in-Chief of EcoTheo Review. An Episcopal priest, he lives with his wife, Allison Grace Myers, and their son Robinson in Texas.
Susan Nguyen is the author of Dear Diaspora (University of Nebraska Press 2021), which won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize, an Outstanding Achievement Award from the Association of Asian American Studies, a New Mexico-Arizona Book Award, and was a finalist for the Julie Suk Award. She is currently the Senior Editor of Hayden's Ferry Review.
Nguyen's poetry is often interested in the body: how geography, history, and trauma leave markers, both visible and invisible. Her poems have been nominated for Best of the Net and a Pushcart Prize and have appeared or are forthcoming in The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day series, The American Poetry Review, The Rumpus, Tin House, Diagram, and elsewhere.
Ruben Quesada is the award-winning editor of Latinx Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry (2022), a collection of original essays from poets of Latin American descent. His writing appears in Best American Poetry, Harvard Review, New York Times Magazine, American Poetry Review, Pilgrimage, Honey Literary, Adroit Journal, Superstition, Tupelo Quarterly, SRPR, Ploughshares, Guernica, TriQuarterly, Pleiades, and others. Quesada is the founder of the Latinx Writers Caucus, which meets annually at the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) Conference and serves to connect and advocate Latinx and Latin American poets and writers from around the world.
