
What Winter Did to Us: A Nature & Poetry Walk
April 3 @ 3:30 pm – 5:00 pm
Join Student Involvement and the Center for 21st Century Studies for a nature and poetry walk celebrating the work of Ada Limón, 24th Poet Laureate of the United States.
Spring is coming to Milwaukee. So is Ada Limón. Prepare for both with a patient, plodding ramble through Downer Woods, featuring reflective writing exercises, group poetry readings, and acts of radical attention. The walk will commence at 3:30 sharp at Curtin Hall‘s 1st floor lobby and will end with a fire circle outside of Merill Hall. Bring a pen, warm clothes, sturdy shoes, and a willingness to be here, with poetry in the natural world.
This event is free and open to the public.
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…the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.
– From “Instructions on Not Giving Up,” Ada Limón
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Ada Limón the author of six books of poetry, including The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. As the 24th Poet Laureate of The United States, her signature project is called You Are Here and focuses on how poetry can help connect us to the natural world. You can catch Ada Limón, the Spring 2025 speaker for UWM’s Distinguished Lecture Series, at the Student Union on April 15, 7-9 PM.
UWM students can also submit their original poems inspired by the theme “Poetry in the Natural World,” as curated by U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limon. These poems will be compiled into a special anthology, As We Are, representing the UWM community in all its natural habitats. The collection will be presented to Ada Limon during her lecture and reading on Tuesday, April 15th.
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The Center for 21st Century Studies (C21) fosters innovative research and community engagement at the intersection of the humanities, arts, and sciences. C21’s theme for 2024-2025 is Slow Knowing: The Pace of Being Human, with programming and sponsored research that calls attention to embodied processes of building and maintaining collective life that resist the fast-paced efficiency models and short attention spans that increasingly define human responses to 21st century social, political, and ecological challenges.