A Prairie Conversation with Wes Jackson and Friends will take on a different cadence, as Jackson’s friends this time are notable poets Robert Hass and Jesse Nathan. Their conversation will focus on ecology, history, literature and visions of a sustainable future. It will take place from 6-8 p.m. April 30 in Peters Science Hall, Room 201, on the Kansas Wesleyan campus.
Jackson ’58, a KWU professor emeritus of biology and co-founder of The Land Institute, will moderate the conversation and the question-and-answer session to follow the presentations.
Hass’s books of poetry include “Time and Materials,” for which he received the Pulitzer Prize in 2008 and the National Book Award in 2007, and “Sun Under Wood,” for which he received the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1996. From 1995 to 1997, he served as poet laureate of the United States.
His most recent collections are “Summer Snow,” a book of new poems published in 2020, and “Poet in the New World,” translations of the poems of Czeslaw Milosz, a book that came out in February. He lives in northern California with his wife, the poet Brenda Hillman, and is professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley.
Nathan was born in Berkeley in 1983 and moved with his family to rural McPherson County in 1993. Nathan and his siblings grew up on a wheat farm near Turkey Creek among his mother’s Mennonite people. His first book of poems, “Eggtooth,” was published in 2023 and won the Great Lakes Colleges Association’s New Writers Award and the Housatonic Book Prize in poetry.
Nathan’s poems have appeared in the Best American Poetry, the Paris Review, the New Republic and the I-70 Review. A graduate of Bethel College in North Newton, Kansas, Nathan published some of his earliest writing in The Land Report and the Kansas City Pitch.
He lives in Oakland, spends as much time as he can on the McPherson farm and teaches English at UC Berkeley.
Books by both poets will be available at Red Fern Booksellers in downtown Salina.
The free program is sponsored by KWU’s Community Resilience Hub, the Resilience Studies Consortium and The Land Institute. A recording of the conversation will be available at www.kwu/crh and www.resiliencestudiesconsortium.com.
For more information on CRH, visit www.kwu.edu/crh.
Release by Jean Kozubowski
