Saturday 9th June, 2018, 10.30-4.30
St Hilda’s College
Oxford
OX4 1DY
Carrie Etter
Philip Gross
Sarah Watkinson
For the third annual Science Poetry event, organized by me for The Poet’s House Oxford and Sarah Watkinson for St Hilda’s College, we are delighted to welcome guest poets Carrie Etter and Philip Gross to read their work and lead a plenary discussion on the creative common ground linking poetry and science. The discussion will be chaired by Sarah and the event introduced and compered by myself and St Hilda’s lecturer Elsa Hammond. This year SciPo will be broadly themed around the topic of Climate Change, and will include a free-to-enter poetry competition judged by the distinguished poet, Jane Draycott, with winners invited to read at the event. The day will end with an open mic session. Do bring a science-related poem of your own to read. We look forward very much to sharing another SciPo with you.
Tickets: £35 – Click here to book, and for competition entry form and rules: http://www.st-hildas.ox.ac.uk/content/scipo-2018-meeting-science-and-poetry
Biographies
Carrie Etter holds a BA from the University of California, Los Angeles and an MFA, MA and PhD from the University of California, Irvine. Her poems have appeared in The New Statesman, Poetry Review, The Rialto, The Times Literary Supplement, and elsewhere, while in the US her poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, The New Republic, Seneca Review, and many other journals. She is also an essayist and a critic. Her reviews of contemporary poetry have appeared in The Independent, The Guardian, and The Times Literary Supplement, among others. Etter has published essays on Sherman Alexie, Peter Reading and W. B. Yeats. She won the London New Poetry Award for a best first collection published in the UK and Ireland in the preceding year, for The Tethers. In 2013 she received an Authors’ Foundation grant from the Society of Authors for work on her third collection, Imagined Sons, which went on to be shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry by the Poetry Society.
Philip Gross has won major prizes including the T.S. Eliot Prize for his collection of poems, The Water Table (2009), an Eric Gregory Award (1981) and the National Poetry Competition (1982). He has been judge for many poetry competitions – in 2014 judging the Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine, the Magma Poetry Competition and the Medicine Unboxed Creative Prize. His earlier poetry collections include The Ice Factory, Cat’s Whisker, The Son of the Duke of Nowhere, I.D., The Wasting Game – all collected in Changes of Address: Poems 1980-98. Of his more recent work, the Poetry Book Society selectors wrote ‘At the heart of all of Gross’s collections has been his deep enquiry into and fascination with the nature of embodiment and existence, what water is and does in The Water Table, the role of language, and speech especially, in identity and the self in Deep Field and Later. Now in Love Songs of Carbon Gross tests and feels his amazed way through the mysteries of the multiple manifestations of love and ageing.’
Sarah Watkinson is Emeritus Fellow at St Hilda’s College Oxford and at Oxford University’s Department of Plant Sciences, where she researched and published extensively on the molecular transformations by which fungi play key roles in the terrestrial carbon cycle, and won an Oxford University teaching award for her course on Molecular Microbial Ecology. She is lead author of the internationally respected textbook, The Fungi, third edition 2016, Elsevier. Since gaining the Oxford University Continuing Education Diploma in Creative Writing in 2012 and becoming a student of The Poet’s House Oxford, her poetry has won the Cinnamon Press Pamphlet Prize for Dung Beetles Navigate by Starlight published in 2017, and won or been placed in competitions judged by Carrie Etter, David Morley and George Szirtes, as well as appearing in anthologies and magazines including Antiphon, Ink Sweat & Tears, Litmus, Pennine Platform, Under the Radar, Rialto and Well Versed.
