Hello.
OK, I'm going to introduce Katherine,
who has many prestigious accomplishments.
She graduated from the University of Arizona
with a BS in ecology and evolutionary biology
and a BA in creative writing.
She was a Henry Holmes fellow at the University of Virginia
and received her MFA in 2004.
In addition to writing, she has spent the last 10
years working as a research assistant and field ecologist.
Larson's first collection, Radial Symmetry,
was selected by Louise Gluck as winner of the Yale
Series of Younger Poets.
She is the recipient of a Ruth Lilly fellowship and the Union
League Civic and Arts Foundation Poetry Prize.
She recently won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award.
Her work has appeared in numerous magazines.
I won't list them all.
It is not surprising for a poet to be inspired by nature.
I think we are stereotyped this way.
Some poets look to the stars, the weather, the seasons,
the plants and animals with such gaunt imaginations
that we as readers forget the effervescent curiosity
that nature invokes in the first place.
Katherine Larson shows us that you
can be inspired through nature, that a poet writing
of environment isn't necessarily sitting under a tree
waiting for an epiphany, but contemplating the odd and equal
symmetry of its leaves.
It seems the keen observations of a scientist
are no different than the sensitive ruminations
of a poet.
The detailed world enthralls us both,
baffles us in its odd geometry, its egocentricless existence.
In it, we marvel.
We swim through cities buried in sea water.
We watch the gods decay.
Through her poetry, we enter what we can't escape,
a hallway with a thousand human brains
carved out of crystal, a world both natural and man-made.
Please welcome Katherine Larson.