Both my poetry and academic writing deal with themes that the National Park Service promotes: an awareness of the natural world and artistic and literary engagement with observed and felt ecologies. I am interested in being part of the archival impulse, at the heart of the NPS Artist-in-Residence program, to document the aesthetic impulse which is a part of our collective and individual response to encounters in our environments. Many of my poems finds roots in the labor of science and the daily observations of people closely aligned with the environment (farmers, gardeners, fisherman, and the sometimes more abstract land-watchers). Other poems consider the lives of animals and plants in the Romantic tradition: by reflecting our own minds onto objects in the world and allowing that light to bend around the material of the natural world, we often discover new ways of seeing. My poems are often referred to as having a documentary style because I like to mix direct records: language fragments, signage, and even scientific papers with stylized imagery from the natural world. My poetry writing method involves observations of people and landscapes and note-taking about particular scientific processes. I often make photographs for reference, though I do not typically treat them in an ekphrastic manner. Instead, I work from memory and impressions of the natural world.
Hannah Star Rogers
Hannah Star Rogers received her MFA in poetry from Columbia University and Ph.D. at Cornell University on the intersection of art and science. She teaches writing at Columbia University and the University of Virginia. Her poems and reviews have appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Tupelo Quarterly, The Carolina Quarterly, and The Brazenhead Review. Her flash fiction has been honored by Nat. Brut and Glimmer Train. She has received the Akademie Schloss Solitude Fellowship in Stuttgart, Germany, Djerassi Artist Residency in Woodside, CA, the international artist residency at ArtHub in Kingman, AZ, the Arctic Circle in Finland, and National Park Service writing residencies in both Schoodic, Maine and the Everglades, FL.
