Margaret Renkl is the author of The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year, which won the 2024 Southern Book Prize and was Reese’s Book Club’s 100th pick. Her earlier books are Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss (2019), which won the Reed Environmental Writing Award in 2020; and Graceland, At Last: Notes on Hope and Heartache From the American South (2021), which won both the Southern Book Prize and the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay in 2022. The companion journal for The Comfort of Crows—Leaf, Cloud, Crow: A Weekly Backyard Journal—is available now.
Since 2017, Renkl has served as a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, where her essays appear on the first and third Mondays of the month. The founding editor of Chapter 16, a daily literary publication of Humanities Tennessee, and a graduate of Auburn University and the University of South Carolina, she lives in Nashville.
Megan Kaminski is a poet and professor of Environmental Studies at the University of Kansas, where her teaching and research work at the intersection of poetic practice, environmental advocacy, and community care. She is interested in the ways that place calls us into relationships of care for the land and for the various human and nonhuman persons (plants and animals) that reside there, and in the ways that call reaches across political and cultural differences. Her work illuminates and engages with that call into reciprocity—and invites others into these relationships in their own daily lives. She is the author of three books of poetry, Gentlewomen (Noemi Press, 2020), Deep City (Noemi Press, 2015) and Desiring Map (Coconut Books, 2012) and two artists books, Prairie Divination (Sunseen Books, 2022), a book of illustrated essays and oracle deck, and Quietly Between (A Viewing Project. 2022), a co-authored collection of poetry and photography. Her place-based sound, poetry, and art installations have appeared at museums, public gardens, and libraries across the country, and her poetry and essays regularly appear in literary magazines and journals.
This event will feature a conversation between Margaret and Megan, followed by a book signing, hosted by the Raven Book Store.
The Kenneth A. Spencer Lecture, hosted by The Commons, is an endowed lecture dedicated to bringing leading thinkers across disciplines and ways of knowing, to address the University of Kansas and regional communities. In recent years, the lecture series has featured writer/historian Rebecca Solnit, poet/scholar/artist Eve L. Ewing, activist/writer Jose Antonio Vargas, author/illustrator/screenwriter Jonny Sun, writer/scientist/enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation Robin Wall Kimmerer, climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe, poet/essayist Ross Gay, forager/land access advocate Alexis Nikole Nelson, poet/novelist/photographer/teacher Ocean Vuong, and writer/activist Brea Baker.
LINK for FREE TICKETS: https://www.universe.com/KURenkl
