Exploration, Empire and Environmental Justice
Elizabeth Bradfield & Sherwin Bitsui
Friday, 29 Mar 2013 at 2:00 pm – Pioneer Room, Memorial Union
Poets Elizabeth Bradfield and Sherwin Bitsui will discuss the political implications as well as the ethics and responsibilities of exploration and resource management in a postcolonial world. Elizabeth Bradfield's poetry collection Approaching Ice portrays the history of polar exploration. Sherwin Bitsui is originally from White Cone, Arizona, on the Navajo Reservation. He is the author of two books of poetry, Shapeshift and Flood Song. Geetha Iyer, an MFA student in Iowa State's Creative Writing and Environment Program, will moderate. The 9th Annual Symposium on Wildness, Wilderness & the Environmental Imagination: The Future of WaterElizabeth Bradfield is also the author of Interpretive Work, which won the Audre Lorde Award. She has been awarded fellowships and scholarships from Stanford University’s Wallace Stegner Program, the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, the Vermont Studio Center, and elsewhere. In 2005 Bradfield founded Broadsided Press. Approaching Ice was a finalist for the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. The book conveys the wonders and dangers, physical and mental, encountered while endeavoring to reach this inhospitable region.
Sherwin Bitsui is Dine of the Todich'ii'nii, Bitter Water Clan, born for the Tl'izilani, Many Goats Clan. His work explores the tensions between the worlds of nature and man as well as the challenge Native Americans face in reconciling an inherited history of lore and spirit with a postmodern civilization. Bitsui's many honors include a 2011 Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship and a 2011 Native Arts & Culture Foundation Arts Fellowship and a Whiting Writers Award. His book Flood Song received a 2010 PEN Open Book Award and an American Book Award.
Geetha Iyer was born in India, grew up in the United Arab Emirates, and moved to the United States to study biology. She has since become an MFA student at Iowa State University's Creative Writing & Environment program. She writes fiction, nonfiction, and poetry with a bent toward place-based and science writing. Her first publication is the recipient of a Gulf Coast Prize in Fiction.
The Future of Water is a series of invited lectures, creative readings, interdisciplinary panel discussions and a documentary film about the secret life and turbulent future of the world’s fresh and salt water supplies.
Cosponsored By:
- Bioethics Program
- Center for Excellence in the Arts & Humanities
- College of Design
- College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
- Ecology, Evolution & Organismal Biology
- Geological & Atmospheric Sciences
- Graduate Program in Sustainable Agriculture
- History
- LAS Miller Lecture Fund
- Landscape Architecture
- Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture
- MFA Program in Creative Writing & Environment
- Wallace Chair for Sustainable Agriculture
- Committee on Lectures (funded by Student Government)
Stay for the entire event, including the brief question-and-answer session that follows the formal presentation. Most events run 75 minutes.
Sign-ins are after the event concludes. For lectures in the Memorial Union, go to the information desk in the Main Lounge. In other academic buildings, look for signage outside the auditorium.
Lecture Etiquette
- Stay for the entire lecture and the brief audience Q&A. If a student needs to leave early, he or she should sit near the back and exit discreetly.
- Do not bring food or uncovered drinks into the lecture.
- Check with Lectures staff before taking photographs or recording any portion of the event. There are often restrictions. Cell phones, tablets and laptops may be used to take notes or for class assignments.
- Keep questions or comments brief and concise to allow as many as possible.