An exploration of our deep connections to life forms and processes through the words of three stunning poets.

Please join us for readings and conversation between poets Mary Newell, B.K. Fischer, and Elizabeth Zuba while we celebrate the publication of Mary’s newest release, ENTWINE. Our guests will explore the vibrant panoply of poetry-science intersections loosely termed “ecopoetics,” while sharing space to honor the lost, abandoned, or endangered as well as the ongoing impulses of care, recovery, and connection. We hope you’ll join this afternoon offering for mutual learning and healing.

About Mary Newell

Mary Newell is the author of ENTWINE (BlazeVox Press, 2025) and poetry chapbooks TILT/ HOVER/ VEER (Codhill Press) and Re-SURGE (Trainwreck Press, now from the author), poems in numerous journals and anthologies, and essays including “When Poetry Rivers” (Interim journal 38.3). She is co-editor of Poetics for the More-than-Human-World: An Anthology of Poetry and Commentary and the Routledge Companion to Ecopoetics.

Newell (MA Columbia, BA Berkeley) received a doctorate from Fordham University with a focus on environment and embodiment in contemporary women’s writing. She teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Connecticut, Stamford and intermittent online classes. The recording of a 2024 interview with the Brooklyn Rail, hosted by Cole Swensen, is at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIIp-pbuSjM. Newell lives in the Hudson Highlands, where she is an ardent gardener of pollinator-friendly plants. Website: https://manitoulive.wixsite.com/maryn

About B.K. Fischer

B.K. Fischer is the author of Ceive (BOA Editions), a finalist for the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Award, and four previous collections of poetry—Radioapocrypha (Mad Creek, Ohio State UP, 2018), My Lover’s Discourse (Tinderbox Editions, 2018), St. Rage’s Vault (The Word Works, 2013), and Mutiny Gallery (Truman State UP, 2011). Fischer’s Ceive, a novella-in-verse, retells the Noah’s Ark story as happening in a dystopian near-future on a container ship.

She is also the author of a critical study, Museum Mediations: Reframing Ekphrasis in Contemporary American Poetry (Routledge, 2006). Her poems and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, The Paris Review, Kenyon Review, Poetry Northwest, Boston Review, Jacket2, FIELD, WSQ, Ninth Letter, Blackbird, Los Angeles Review of Books, Modern Language Studies and elsewhere. She holds a BA from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, an MFA in poetry from Columbia University, and a PhD in English and American Literature from New York University.

A former poetry editor of Boston Review, she teaches The Comma Sutra, a cross-genre seminar on grammar and syntax for creative practice, in the Writing Program at Columbia University’s School of the Arts. She was the inaugural Poet Laureate of Westchester County from 2021-2023, and an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow in 2022. Her newest book of poems, Disaster Porn, is forthcoming from BOA Editions in early 2027.

About Elizabeth Zuba

Elizabeth Zuba is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Decoherent The Wing’ed (SplitLevel Texts) and the forthcoming Where Is Everyone! (Conduit) which won the 2024 Minds on Fire Book Prize; and the chapbook May Double as a Whistle (The Song Cave). She also translates and edits art books (Granary Books, Printed Matter, Inc., Siglio Press, and Ugly Duckling Presse.)

WHERE IS EVERYONE! is a series of poem-meditations on what is sometimes reductively referred to as "life science," and could be described as a critical, if somewhat fantastical, supplement to the more traditional and extremely limited kinds of science taught in classrooms everywhere. A scientific companion of sorts, this book is written enthusiastically and specifically for the student of science, which is to say the student of the earth, which is to say the student of life, which is to say everyone and anyone who has ever existed and so forth and so on, all the way down to the littlest electron.

Contact the host of Poets Mary Newell, B.K. Fischer, and Elizabeth Zuba