A profound exploration of the intersections of ecological awareness, social justice, and poetic expression
Join poet and co-editor Ann Fisher-Wirth and featured writers for the launch event for Attached to the Living World, a collection of more than 150 contemporary poems that urge collective reflection on our carbon footprint, and a shared commitment to sustainable futures.
Featuring readings from Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Al Favilla, Ann Fisher-Wirth, Beth Ann Fennelly, Kendall Dunkelberg, Leona Sevick, Maggie Graber, Melissa Ginsburg and Stacey Balkun.
The evening’s event is a prologue for the 31st Oxford Conference for the Book, an annual gathering that brings together teachers, publishers, booksellers, writers, scholars, agents, editors, and booklovers. For more information about the conference visit: oxfordconferenceforthebook.com
About the book
The Ecopoetry Anthology is the authoritative book of contemporary American poetry about nature and the environment. Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street, the editors of the daring first volume, have reunited to create Attached to the Living World.
The second anthology explores the issues and conversations in ecopoetry over the past decade and features more than 150 established and emerging poets, including Mildred Barya, Nickole Brown, Simmons Buntin, Lauren Camp, Iris Jamahl Dunkle, Vievee Francis, CMarie Fuhrman, Ross Gay, Erin Hollowell, Marie Howe, Petra Kuppers, J. Drew Lanham, Ada Limόn, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, January Gill O’Neil, Catherine Pierce, Tracy K. Smith, Brian Teare, and Natasha Tretheway. With a foreword by Camille Dungy and an introduction by Margaret Ronda, the poems gathered here provide vital visions to nurture our imaginations and spur us to act.
About the authors
Ann Fisher-Wirth is the author of several poetry books, including Paradise Is Jagged, The Bones of Winter Birds, Mississippi, and Carta Marina. She has received the Malahat Review Long Poem Prize, the Rita Dove Poetry Award, two Mississippi Arts Commission Poetry fellowships, the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Poetry Prize and 2023 Governor’s Award for Excellence in Poetry from the Mississippi Arts Commission. She is retired from the University of Mississippi where she was Professor of English and director of the Environmental Studies program.
Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of the New York Times best-selling collection of nature essays, World of Wonders. She also wrote four previous poetry collections including Oceanic. She is poetry editor for SIERRA magazine, the story-telling arm of The Sierra Club, and is professor of English and Creative Writing in the University of Mississippi’s MFA program. Her newest book is a collection of food essays, Bite by Bite.
Alyson (“Al”) Favilla is an MFA student and a Grisham Fellow in poetry at the University of Mississippi. You can find their work in Poetry Ireland Review, Diode, Electric Literature, McSweeney’s, and, most recently, Attached to the Living World: A New Ecopoetry Anthology.
Beth Ann Fennelly, poet laureate of Mississippi from 2016-2021, is the author of six books, most recently, Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs. Her newest, The Irish Goodbye: Memoirs & Micro-Memoirs will be published in February of 2026.
Kendall Dunkelberg directs the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing and the Eudora Welty Writers’ Symposium at Mississippi University for Women. He is editor of Poetry South and has published three collections of poetry, Barrier Island Suite, Time Capsules, and Landscapes and Architectures, as well as the textbook A Writer’s Craft: Multi-genre Creative Writing. His fourth poetry collection, Tree Fall with Birdsong, will be published by Fernwood Press in May 2025.
Leona Sevick’s work appears in Orion, The Southern Review, The Sun, and Poetry Northwest. Leona serves on the advisory boards of the Furious Flower Black Poetry Center and the Longleaf Writers Conference. She is provost and professor of English at Bridgewater College in Virginia, where she teaches Asian American literature. Her second collection of poems, The Bamboo Wife, was published by Trio House Press in 2024.
Maggie Graber is the author of Swan Hammer (MSU Press, 2022), winner of the 2021 Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize and a 2023 nominee for a Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award. Graber has received fellowships from Mississippi Arts Commission and Luminarts Cultural Foundation in support of her writing, and she currently lives and teaches in Oxford, Mississippi, where she earned her Ph.D.
Melissa Ginsburg is the author of the novels The House Uptown and Sunset City, the poetry collections Runoff (forthcoming in 2026 from Milkweed Editions), Doll Apollo, and Dear Weather Ghost, and three poetry chapbooks, Arbor, Double Blind, and Apollo. She is winner of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Poetry award and has been named the South Arts 2024 Mississippi State Fellow for Literary Arts. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Image, Guernica, Kenyon Review, Fence, Southwest Review, and other magazines. She is Director of graduate Creative Writing Programs at the University of Mississippi in Oxford.
Stacey Balkun is the author of Sweetbitter and co-editor of Fiolet & Wing. Her work has appeared in Best New Poets, Mississippi Review, Pleiades, and several other anthologies and journals. Stacey holds a PhD from the University of Mississippi, Oxford and an MFA from Fresno State. She lives in New Orleans and teaches online at The Poetry Barn.
