Art United Poetry and Art Workshop - Climate Anxiety

Art United is a two session poetry-and-visual art workshop for members of the NC State community. This year, Art United will focus on working through feelings of climate anxiety, or eco-anxiety, defined by The Handbook of Climate Psychology as “heightened emotional, mental, or somatic distress in response to dangerous changes in the climate system.”

In this two-session workshop, participants will work on individual and collaborative poems, comics, and zines with acclaimed poets and artists Aaron Angello, Sommer Browning, and Melissa Crowe. No previous poetry or art experience is required, and all materials will be provided.

All workshop participants will receive complimentary tickets to Small Island Big Song, a concert featuring eight Indigenous artists from across the island nations of the Pacific and Indian Oceans, a region at the frontline of the climate crisis (Friday, 4/12, 7:30 PM in Stewart Theatre). We’ll also feed you dinner and lunch.

After the workshop, participants can choose to share their work through a Libraries gallery exhibit, or through zines we’ll share with the campus community.

Aaron Angello is a writer and theatre artist living and working in Frederick, Maryland. He received his MFA and PhD from the University of Colorado Boulder. Currently, he teaches writing and literature at Hood College, where he also is director of the theatre program. His poetry and essays have appeared in numerous journals, and his genre-defying book The Fact of Memory: 114 Ruminations and Fabrications was published in 2022 by Rose Metal Press. Most recently, he directed poet Sommer Browning in her one-woman play, Good Actors.

Sommer Browning is a poet, writer, artist, and librarian. Her latest book is Good Actors (Birds, LLC; 2022). She’s the author of two other collections of poetry, Backup Singers and Either Way I’m Celebrating, as well as the artist book, The Circle Book (Cuneiform Press), the joke book, You’re On My Period (Counterpath), and others. From 2017-2023, she ran GEORGIA, an art space in her garage in Denver. In 2023, she adapted her book Good Actors into a one-woman show, performing it all over The United States, most recently at CPR-Center for Performance Research in Brooklyn. Her poetry, art writing, and comics have appeared in Hyperallergic, Lit Hub, Bomb, Artforum, Chicago Review, The American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She works as a reference librarian at Reynolds Community College in Richmond, Virginia.

Melissa Crowe is the author of Dear Terror, Dear Splendor (University of Wisconsin Press, 2019) and Lo (University of Iowa Press, 2023), winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared recently or is forthcoming in 32 Poems, Gulf Coast, New England Review, and Poetry Northwest, and she was the recipient of the 2021 Robert H. Winner Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. She coordinates the MFA program at UNCW, where she teaches poetry and publishing.