The Poetry of Place

This program is designed for groups of all ages. It is designed to foster an increased awareness and appreciation of each participant’s local environment: What is special about it? What is unusual about it? What memories do you have in connection with it? What environmental issues does it face?

Ann will begin the session by reading several of her Mississippi place-based poems, and offering some remarks on the possible role of poetry in fostering environmental awareness and consciousness. Then she will invite a discussion among students or adult audience members as to their thoughts on what poetry can—in the words of Joseph Conrad—“make you hear…make you feel…and, above all, …make you see,” with regard to place.

This program would lead toward a project on the creation of state-wide community-based poetry of place Ann Fisher-Wirth hopes to inaugurate in the future as Poet Laureate.

Speakers Expertise:

Ann Fisher-Wirth is the Mississippi Poet Laureate for the 2025-2029 term. Her eighth book of poems, Into the Chalice of Your Thoughts, is a poetry/photography collaboration with Wilfried Raussert and translations of the poems into Spanish by the Women in Translation collective (U Guadalajara Press, 2023). Her seventh book is Paradise Is Jagged (Terrapin Books, 2023). With Laura-Gray Street, she coedited The Ecopoetry Anthology (Trinity UP, 2013) and Attached to the Living World: A New Ecopoetry Anthology (Trinity UP, 2025). A senior fellow of the Black Earth Institute, Ann has had Fulbrights to Switzerland and Sweden; a Fulbright Specialist Award to lecture on ecopoetry at Cappadocia University, Turkey, was cancelled by the current State Department. She has had residencies at Djerassi, Hedgebrook, Storyknife, and elsewhere. She has received the 2023 Governor’s Award for Excellence in Literature and Poetry from the Mississippi Arts Commission, as well as three Mississippi Arts Commission Poetry Fellowships, the MS Institute of Arts Poetry Award, and fifteen Pushcart nominations. Ann retired in 2022 from the University of Mississippi, where she taught in the MFA program and directed the Environmental Studies program. Also she taught yoga at Southern Star in Oxford for many years.