Join the Climate Museum in celebrating the official launch of To Leave for Our Own Country, the debut poetry collection from John Linstrom, the Climate Museum’s Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Climate Humanities and Social Justice.
John will read a selection of poems from his new book, alongside readings by outstanding fellow poets Louis Bury, Mariposa Fernández, and Kendra Sullivan, all of whom have written about climate change in a genre that, on the whole, has been slow to explore it. After the readings, Sonya Posmentier, Associate Professor of English at NYU, will moderate a discussion and Q&A with the poets, exploring the role of poetry in activating civic engagement with climate change and social justice. Light refreshments will be served, and books will be available for purchase and signing.
Cosponsors:
NYU Arts & Science, Department of English
NYU Arts & Science, Organism for Poetic Research
CUNY Graduate Center, Center for the Humanities
More about the poets below.
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Louis Bury is an art writer, author of two books, The Way Things Go (punctum books, 2023) and Exercises in Criticism (Dalkey Archive, 2015), and Associate Professor of English at Hostos Community College, CUNY. He has contributed reviews, interviews, and features to magazines such as Hyperallergic, BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, and Art in America.
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Mariposa Fernández is poet, scholar-activist, and Inaugural Letras Boricua Mellon Fellow. She is a Lecturer in the English Department at Lehman College where she teaches creative writing and literature courses, and is an Advisory Board Member of the NYC Climate Justice Hub. She is the author of Born Bronxeña: Poems on Identity, Survival, Love & Freedom (2001).
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John Linstrom is the Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Climate Humanities and Social Justice at the Climate Museum and an incoming Assistant Professor of English at Centenary College of Louisiana. He is the author of To Leave for Our Own Country (Black Lawrence, 2024) and series editor of The Liberty Hyde Bailey Library for Cornell University Press.
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Kendra Sullivan is a public artist, an activist-scholar, and a poet. She is the Director of the Center for the Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she leads the Andrew W. Mellon Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research and co-directs the NYC Climate Justice Hub. Her books include Zero Point Dream Poems (Doublecross Press) and Reps (Ugly Duckling Presse).
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Sonya Posmentier is an Associate Professor of English at New York University, where she teaches African American and Black Diasporic literature and culture, poetry and poetics, and environmental literature. Her first book, Cultivation and Catastrophe: The Lyric Ecology of Modern Black Literature (Johns Hopkins UP, 2017) received the William Sanders Scarborough award from the Modern Language Association.