A Darker Wilderness book launch
Black nature writing from soil to stars
In partnership with Milkweed Editions
With Erin Sharkey, Michael Kleber-Diggs, katie robinson, and Tia-Simone Gardner
Thu, Feb 2, 7 pm
Open Book Performance Hall
Join us for a special book launch event in celebration of author Erin Sharkey’s A Darker Wilderness (Milkweed Editions)—a vibrant collection of personal and lyric essays in conversation with archival objects of Black history and memory featuring a constellation of luminary writers. Featuring live readings from the book’s contributors Michael Kleber-Diggs, katie robinson, and Tia-Simone Gardner, and a conversation to follow. Pre-order the book here.
About A Darker Wilderness
What are the politics of nature? Who owns it, where is it, what role does it play in our lives? Does it need to be tamed? Are we ourselves natural? In A Darker Wilderness, writers reflect on the significance of nature in their lived experiences and on the role of nature in the lives of Black folks in the United States. Each of these essays engages with a single archival object, whether directly or obliquely, exploring stories spanning hundreds of years and thousands of miles, traveling from roots to space and finding rich Blackness everywhere.
Erin Sharkey considers Benjamin Banneker’s 1795 almanac as she follows the passing of seasons in an urban garden in Buffalo. Naima Penniman reflects on a statue of Haitian revolutionary François Makandal, within her own pursuit of environmental justice. Ama Codjoe meditates on rain, hair, protest, and freedom via a photo of a young woman during a civil rights demonstration in Alabama. And so on—with wide-ranging contributions from Carolyn Finney, Ronald Greer II, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Sean Hill, Michael Kleber-Diggs, Glynn Pogue, Katie Robinson, and Lauret Savoy—unearthing evidence of the ways Black people’s relationship to the natural world has persevered through colonialism, slavery, state-sponsored violence, and structurally racist policies like Jim Crow and redlining.
A scrapbook, a family chest, a quilt—and an astounding work of historical engagement and literary accomplishment—A Darker Wilderness is a collection brimming with abundance and insight.
Erin Sharkey is a writer, arts and abolition organizer, cultural worker, and film producer based in Minneapolis. She is the cofounder, with Junauda Petrus, of an experimental arts collective called Free Black Dirt and is the producer of film projects including Sweetness of Wild, an episodic web film project, and Small Business Revolution (Hulu), which explored challenges and opportunities for Black-owned businesses in the Twin Cities in the summer of 2021. Sharkey has received fellowships and residencies from the Loft Mentor Series, VONA/Voices, the Givens Foundation, Coffee House Press, the Bell Museum of Natural History, and the Jerome Foundation. In 2021, Sharkey was awarded the Black Seed Fellowship from Black Visions and the Headwaters Foundation. She has an MFA in creative writing from Hamline University and teaches with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop.
katie robinson is a student of love, trauma, and transformation. Their academic, artistic, and community work is present with individual and collective harm, as they try to understand our wounds outside of a modernist-colonial paradigm. In plotting transformation on big levels, they focus on small, attending to transformation at the levels of the psyche, the nervous system, and the close relationship. katie’s poem, “The Biggest Fish I Follow Follows Ghosts” was featured in the Queer Voices anthology from Minnesota Historical Society Press, and they were a fellow in the Givens Emerging Writer’s program in 2015. Currently, they are in the last year of their PhD program, working on a dissertation at the intersections of depth psychology, decoloniality, and police and prison abolition. katie lives in Minneapolis with their wife, dog, and cat, daylighting as a trainer and facilitator for racial and social justice movements.
Tia-Simone Gardner is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and Black feminist scholar. Her creative and scholarly practice are interested in interdisciplinary strategies and engage ideas of ritual, iconoclasm, and geography. Gardner received her BA in Art and Art History from the University of Alabama in Birmingham. In 2009 she received her MFA in Interdisciplinary Practices and Time-Based Media from the University of Pennsylvania. Gardner participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program as a Studio Fellow and has been an invited artist at a number of national and international artist residencies including the Center for Photography at Woodstock, A Studio in the Woods, and IASPIS Sweden. She has also been awarded a number of fellowships for her work including the McKnight Visual Artist Fellowship. She is currently working on a project on Blackness and the Mississippi River as well as a photographic/writing project with her mother that addresses questions of biopolitics, Black memory, and indigeneity by looking at the houses that the women in her family lived in the post-bellum South.
Michael Kleber-Diggs is the author of Worldly Things, which was awarded the 2020 Max Ritvo Poetry Prize. He was born and raised in Kansas and now lives in St. Paul, Minnesota. His work has appeared in Lit Hub, the Rumpus, Rain Taxi, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Water~Stone Review, Midway Review, North Dakota Quarterly, and a few anthologies. Michael teaches poetry and creative non-fiction through the Minnesota Prison Writers Workshop.