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Press
Kit
WATERSHED
Environmental
Poetry Festival
Saturday,
September 6, 2003
•
Noon to 5:00pm
•
Free
Martin Luther King, Jr. Park
Civic Center Park
•
Berkeley
MLK
Jr. Way at Center • One
Block West from Downtown Berkeley
BART
Strawberry
Creek Walk • 10 am at Oxford
& Center
For
Immediate Release: August 1, 2003
For
More Information Contact: Mark
Baldridge:
510-526-9105
Former U.S.
Poet Laureate Robert Hass,
poet, fiction writer, and
filmmaker Sherman Alexie,
poets B.H. Fairchild,
Sharon Doubiago, and
Maya Khosla, author and
historian Gray Brechin,
and Anima Mundi Dance
Company with
dancer/choreographer Kathryn
Roszak, dancer Terese
Hoibye, and actor Earll
Kingston performing
highlights from Gary Snyder's
Mountains and Rivers Without
End head a list of artists
and activists inviting the
community to celebrate nature at
the Eighth Annual Watershed
Environmental Poetry Festival, a
free day of poetry, music, and
interactive environmental events
in Berkeley's Civic Center Park,
Martin Luther King Jr. Way at
Center Street, Saturday,
September 6, from noon to 5
p.m.
Each year, the
Watershed Festival explores the
connection between the American
literary imagination and our
landscape, natural history, and
sense of environmental urgency.
This tradition typically stems
from writers such as Henry David
Thoreau, John Muir, Robinson
Jeffers, Kenneth Rexroth, Wallace
Stegner, Gary Snyder, and Terry
Tempest Williams. While honoring
this tradition, Watershed also
seeks to examine the current
spectrum of the American literary
imagination. In addition to main
stage readings and performances,
the Festival encourages
involvement in local projects via
River Village, an area for
interactive arts, all-ages nature
activities, and literary and
grassroots organizations.
Participants include Shorebird
Nature Center (sign up for
Coastal Clean Up), California
Poets in the Schools (Words Take
Flight poetry kites), Ecology
Center (simulated restoration of
Strawberry Creek), Poetry Flash
(poetry rubbing panels), East Bay
Depot for Creative Reuse (Critter
Mascots masks), and River of
Words (student poetry and
posters).
Again, this
year's event will discover
connections between literature
and place with a special "Creek
Walk," which begins at Oxford and
Center Streets at 10 am. The
public is invited to join our
featured readers, local poets and
environmentalists for a short
hike up Strawberry Creek through
the UC Campus and back through
downtown Berkeley, tracing the
route of the creek as it tunnels
beneath the heart of the city to
the site of the festival. As
Berkeley's premier watershed,
Strawberry Creek flows open from
the hills through the UC campus
but disappears in a culvert under
most of the city as it makes its
way to the Bay. The walk will
focus on the project of
"daylighting" the creek. At
several points throughout the
tour, featured readers will offer
their insights, local poets will
read from their work, and
restoration advocates will
discuss efforts to daylight
different parts of the creek. At
the Watershed Festival site, the
creek, which runs directly
beneath it, will be "miked,"
letting it play gently behind the
readers as they present their
poems.
With a history
of artistic excellence and
grassroots support, this program
reaches a broad community of
school-age children, families,
poets, artists and
environmentalists with poetry,
art, and current information
about our natural landscape. The
Watershed Festival is a
collaboration between Robert
Hass, Poetry
Flash, the Ecology
Center/Berkeley Farmers'
Market, EcoCity
Builders, and Save The
Bay.
Calendar
Editors
Event:
Eighth Annual Watershed Poetry
Festival
Featuring:
Robert Hass, poet, fiction
writer and filmmaker Sherman
Alexie, poets B.H.
Fairchild, Sharon
Doubiago, and Maya
Khosla, author and historian
Gray Brechin, and Anima
Mundi Dance Company with
dancer/choreographer Kathryn
Roszak, dancer Terese
Hoibye, and actor Earll
Kingston performing
highlights from Gary Snyder's
Mountains and Rivers Without
End, plus many other poets,
environmental activists,
musicians, and
naturalists.
Also:
River Village environmental and
literary exhibits and interactive
events for the entire family; We
Are Nature Open Reading (sign up
at the Festival)
When:
Saturday, September 6, noon-5
p.m.
Where:
Civic Center Park, Martin Luther
King Jr. Way at Center Street,
Berkeley
Pre-festival
event: Strawberry Creek Walk,
with featured poets and creek
restoration advocates, begins 10
a.m. at Oxford and Center
Streets, Berkeley
Admission
to all events:
Free
Sponsoring
organizations: Poetry Flash,
Ecology Center/Berkeley Farmers'
Market, EcoCity Builders Save The
Bay.
Information:
(510) 526-9105 or
www.poetryflash.org
Selected
Watershed Presenter
Bios
Robert Hass
Robert
Hass, U.S. Poet Laureate
1995-97, was the first U.S. Poet
Laureate from the West; during
his tenure he attracted national
media attention to poetry and to
the importance of American nature
writing. He has received two
National Book Critics Circle
Awards in different categories,
once for his volume of essays,
Twentieth Century
Pleasures and once for
poetry. His acclaimed books of
poetry include Human
Wishes, Praise,
Field Guide, and, most
recently, Sun Under Wood.
The Los Angeles Times
called it "…Hass at his
best. It is a book to reread,
always with the lucky sense of
walking through a meadow with a
friend, deep in the best kind of
exchange." His many literary
honors include the John D. and
Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship
--the "Genius Award"--and the
Yale Series of Younger Poets
Award. Robert Hass has edited and
translated many books including
The Essential Haiku: Versions
of Basho, Buson, and Issa and
Transtromer's Selected Poems:
1954-1986. He has also
co-translated many collections by
the great Nobel Prize-winning
Polish poet, Czeslaw Milosz,
including Unattainable
Earth and Provinces,
and contributed to Dante's
Inferno: Translations by Twenty
Contemporary Poets. He is
also the author of Poet's
Choice: Poems for Everyday
Life, drawn from his
nationally syndicated "Poet's
Choice" columns.
Robert Hass
combines writing and
environmentalism in his own
poetry and in his work for
literacy across the United
States. In addition to initiating
the Watershed Festival, he
founded River of Words, an
environmental and arts education
organization for students K-12.
In 1997, he was selected Educator
of the Year by the North American
Association on Environmental
Education. Robert Hass is
professor of English at UC
Berkeley.
B.H. Fairchild
B.H.
Fairchild recently received
the National Book Critics Circle
Award for his latest collection
of poetry, Early Occult Memory
Systems of the Lower Midwest.
In 1985, he published his first
book of poems, The Arrival of
the Future, recently
republished by Alice James Books;
his collection, The Art of the
Lathe, won the 1996 Capricorn
Award and the Beatrice Hawley
Award from Alice James Books in
1997. He has received various
other awards, including the
William Carlos Williams Award,
the PEN West Poetry Award, and
the California Book Award. The
New Yorker, Paris
Review, Hudson Review,
Southern Review,
Poetry, Yale
Review, and Sewanee
Review have all published his
work. He has also appeared in the
anthology Best American Poems
of 2000.
B.H.
Fairchild's ongoing contributions
to literature were recently
recognized by The American
Academy of Arts and Letters when
he was awarded the Arthur Rense
Poetry Prize for "consistent
excellence over a long career."
Gerald Stern describes
Fairchild's poetry as "in touch
with that America we almost
forgot, melancholy, dream-ridden,
wistful, ghost-like."
Sharon Doubiago
Sharon
Doubiago is the author of
many books of poems, including
South America Mi Hija,
which was twice nominated for the
National Book Award. Her
booklength poem Hard
Country, perhaps the first of
the feminist epics, singing an
unknown, radical history of
America, has recently been
republished. For both poetry and
fiction, she is the recipient of
three Pushcart Prizes. Sharon
Doubiago has also written two
collections of short stories,
The Book of Seeing With One's
Own Eyes and El
Niño. For her
work-in-progress, the
autobiographical Son, she
has received two Oregon Institute
of Literary Arts Creative
Nonfiction Fellowships and
numerous other honors. Besides
being a contributor to many
journals, Sharon Doubiago has
been a visiting writer in
schools, universities, and art
centers.
Maya Khosla
Maya
Khosla is the recipient of
this year's Dorothy Brunsman
Award for her manuscript Keel
Bone. She is also the author
of a creative nonfiction book
about salmon, titled Web of
Water. Her work is influenced
both by her background in biology
and her childhood spent in
various countries--England,
Algeria, Burma, Bhutan, India,
and Bangladesh.
Gray Brechin
Gray
Brechin received his Ph.D. in
Geography from the University of
California, Berkeley. He is the
co-author of Farewell,
Promised Land: Awakening from the
California Dream. His most
recent book, Imperial San
Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly
Ruin, explores the history
and ecology of the Bay Area. Gray
Brechin works as a television
producer, journalist, and
curator.
Anima Mundi Dance
Company
Anima Mundi
Dance Company presents its
dance-theater adaptation of Gary
Snyder's Mountains and Rivers
Without End. Exploring the
various landscapes that the epic
myth-poem presents, Anima Mundi
combines Christopher Castle's
music and visuals with Kathryn
Roszak's choreography and dance
performance. Highlights of this
performance piece, will be
performed by dancer/choreographer
Kathryn Roszak, dancer
Terese Hoibye, and actor
Earll Kingston as Gary
Snyder. Anima Mundi, co-directed
by Roszak and Castle has
performed locally at Grace
Cathedral and Theatre Artaud, and
has been presented by La MaMa
Theatre in New York, the
Smithsonian in Washington D.C.
and the Copenhagen Cultural
Festival. The company celebrates
arts, environment and humanity.
Recent productions include The
Mathematics of Life,
Celtic Fire, and
Pensive Spring: A Portrait of
Emily Dickinson which was
presented at the University of
San Francisco. Mountains and
Rivers Without End was
developed in residencies at the
Magic Theatre, and was performed
at the Grass Valley Center for
the Performing Arts in Nevada
City, California. It will have
further performances this October
at Yoshi's Jazz Club in Oakland
and at Falkirk Cultural Center in
San Rafael..
Earll Kingston
Earll
Kingston is featured as Gary
Snyder. An Oakland native,
Kingston has been an actor for
over thirty years. Following his
graduation from UC Berkeley, he
spent the summers between 1989
and 1996 at the Grand Canyon
performing Lee Stetson's Down
the Great Unknown, a one-man
show based on the Colorado River
explorations of geologist and
ethnologist John Wesley Powell.
He has recently co-written We
Meet At Appomattox, which
retells the events that brought
Generals Lee and Grant together
in 1865.
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