The Writer’s Center welcomes Randall Amster, Colonel Roger Chang, Lisa Couturier and Linda Dove for a reading from the new poetry anthology Convergence: Poetry on the Environmental Impacts of War (Scarlet Tanager Books).
About the Anthology
Convergence: Poetry on Environmental Impacts of War offers a groundbreaking and vital perspective on war’s destruction of the natural world—the creatures, plants, soil, water, and atmosphere of Earth. In poems and contextual comments, 61 contemporary poets focus on military damages to the ecosystems on six continents and the moon. Framed by a cogent introduction and a pair of forewords, one on the poetry and the other on global consequences, the poems are accompanied by a tally of ecological costs and a set of thought-provoking discussion and writing prompts for teens and adults. This compelling anthology alerts readers to environmental degradation of our planet while affirming nature’s resilience and regeneration.
Randall Amster, J.D., Ph.D., is a Teaching Professor in The Earth Commons at Georgetown University. He writes for a wide range of publications on themes of peace and nonviolence, social and environmental justice, political theory, and emerging technologies. His most recent book is Peace Ecology (Routledge).
Colonel Roger Chang, with 30 years active and reserve duty in the United States Army, escaped the Communist Chinese takeover as a child. Currently at work on his story, “Helping Keep the Cold War Cold,” about the part he played, in 1973, to prevent the exchange of 7,500 thermonuclear warheads in seventeen minutes, Colonel Chang will read the poetry of veteran Sean Mclain Brown that appears in the anthology.
A 2022 finalist for the Annie Dillard Award in Creative Nonfiction and a Pushcart Prize winner for “Dark Horse,” Lisa Couturier is author of The Hopes of Snakes (Beacon) and Animals / Bodies (Finishing Line), winner of the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize. A notable essayist in Best American Essays, 2004, 2006, 2011, she is a writer with the Sowell Family Collection in Literature, Community and the Natural World.
Linda Dove holds a Ph.D. in Renaissance literature and teaches college writing. She is also an award-winning poet of five books: In Defense of Objects (2009), O Dear Deer, (2011), This Too (2017; reprint 2027), Fearn (2019), and Switchfish (2023), as well as the scholarly collection of essays, Women, Writing, and the Reproduction of Culture in Tudor and Stuart Britain (2000). Poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, the Robert H. Winner Award from the Poetry Society of America, Best of the Net, and Best Microfiction. While in southern California, she served as the Altadena Poet Laureate from 2012-2014, as well as the founding editor of MORIA Literary Magazine. She recently relocated to her hometown of Columbia, Maryland.
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