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Poets and scientists from across the country – including current U.S. Poet Laureate Arthur Sze and other award-winning authors – will converge at ����ԭ�� in November for the first-ever Poets for Science Gathering.

, founded in 2017 and based at ����ԭ��’s nationally distinctive Wick Poetry Center, is a participatory project and installation exploring the connection between science and poetry. 

The event will take place Nov. 12-14 on the Kent Campus, with hundreds expected to attend, David Hassler, the Bob and Walt Wick Executive Director of the center, told ����ԭ�� Today.

Registration is now open for attendees, and proposals are being accepted for one-hour breakout sessions in a range of formats, including readings, panels, presentations, and generative workshops, he said.

Hassler said the gathering will welcome writers, scientists, researchers, educators, students, clinicians, policymakers, community organizers, and curious members of the general public.

“This conference is for those who are curious about the meeting ground between science and the imaginative life, for those who want to participate in a new kind of conversation —one in which poetry can serve science, and science can inform the poetic imagination,” Hassler said.

The event will feature three days of readings, panels, participatory events, formal conversations, informal discussions, an open mic reading, and a book fair.

Featured poets and scientists scheduled to appear at the gathering are:

• Diane Ackerman, author of two dozen highly acclaimed works of nonfiction and poetry, including New York Times bestsellers “The Human Age,” “The Zookeeper’s Wife,” and “Natural History of the Senses.” Ackerman has received the Stephen Hawking Medal for Communicating Science, P.E.N. Henry David Thoreau Award for Nature Writing, the Orion Book Award and the John O'Donohue Poetry Award, among many others. In 2016, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
• Kimberly Blaeser, founding director of Indigenous Nations Poets and past Wisconsin Poet Laureate, is the author of works in several genres, including six poetry collections. An activist and environmentalist, Blaeser has won numerous writing honors and is a Professor Emerita at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and a master of fine arts faculty member at the Institute of American Indian Arts.
• Alison Hawthorne Deming, an award-winning poet, essayist and naturalist, explores the intersection of art and science. Former director of the University of Arizona Poetry Center and Agnese Nelms Haury Chair of Environment and Social Justice, she is Regents Professor Emerita at the University of Arizona, where she founded the Field Studies in Writing Program in 2015.
• Camille T. Dungy, author of “America, A Love Story,” and numerous essays and collections, edited “Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry,”&�Բ�����;the first anthology to bring African American environmental poetry to national attention. She is the host of “Immaterial,” a podcast from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and serves as a University Distinguished Professor at Colorado State University.
• Jane Hirshfield, among American poetry’s foremost spokespersons for the biosphere, founded Poets For Science in 2017, in tandem with the Wick Poetry Center. She is the author of ten much-honored books of poetry, most recently “The Asking: New and Selected Poems,”&�Բ�����;two now-classic essay collections, and four books collecting world poets from the deep past. Her work has been translated into seventeen languages and appears regularly in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, and the Best American Poems anthology. A former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and spring 2026 visiting fellow at Harvard Divinity School, Hirshfield was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2019.
• Brandon Kilbourne, poet and research biologist from Berlin, Germany and a Cave Canem Fellow, his debut collection “Natural History” was winner of the 2025 Cave Canem Prize and went on to be selected by Smithsonian Magazine as one of the ten best science books of 2025, in addition to being a finalist for the 2026 PEN Open Book Award. In 2024, he was artist-in-residence at the School of Veterinary Medicine at Louisiana State University, where he explored parallels between poetry and science.

• Phillip Levin, the interim executive director of EarthLab, a visionary institute at the University of Washington taking equitable action on climate change. He previously served as a professor of practice at UW and as the lead scientist for the Nature Conservancy of Washington. Levin is a conservation scientist who is interested in bridging the gaps between theory and practice and between social and natural sciences. The main focus of his work is developing interdisciplinary tools to inform conservation of marine and terrestrial ecosystems and the communities that depend on them.
• Jane Lubchenco, Ph.D. Wayne and Gladys Valley Professor of Marine Biology and University Distinguished Professor, Department of Integrative Biology at Oregon State University, is a world-renowned environmental scientist with deep experience in science and exploration, academia, and government. She is a champion of science, the stronger engagement of scientists with society, and finding durable solutions to environmental challenges. She served two terms on the National Science Board, the Board of Directors for the National Science Foundation, and served as Under Secretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere and the Administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and was an inaugural member of President Obama's “Science Dream Team."
• Melissa K. Nelson, Ph.D., professor of Indigenous Sustainability in the School of Sustainability, College of Global Futures at Arizona State University, is an Indigenous ecologist, writer, editor, media-maker and award-winning scholar-activist, and served as founding executive director and CEO of The Cultural Conservancy, an Indigenous-led nonprofit organization from 1993-2021.
• Maria Popova, a Bulgarian-born essayist, book author, poet and writer of literary and arts commentary and cultural criticism, is the creator of the website, “The Marginalian.” Popova began the site as a blog in 2006 under the name “Brain Pickings.” It includes her writing on books, art, philosophy, culture and other subjects and is included in the Library of Congress’ permanent digital archive of culturally valuable materials. Her books and projects include “Traversal,”&�Բ�����;“The Universe in Verse,” “Figuring,” “The Coziest Place on the Moon,”&�Բ�����;and “An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days.”
• Tracy K. Smith, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, memoirist, editor, translator and librettist, who served as the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States, is the author of five poetry collections, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Life on Mars.”&�Բ�����;She is the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University, and a Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at Harvard Radcliffe Institute.
• Arthur Sze, is the current and 25^th Poet Laureate of the United States, author of 12 poetry collections and the recipient of numerous poetry and literary awards. He is a professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts and was the first poet laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico.

“For presentations, we welcome sessions that expand the possibilities of science communication through the literary arts or illuminate the scientific imagination through poetic practice,” Hassler said.

Presenters who are selected will receive a waiver for full registration fees, so those who submit proposals are asked to wait to see if they are accepted before registering for the conference.

Hassler said the work of the Poets for Science collaboration continues to expand. The Wick Poetry Center received $50,000 grants from both the Poetry Foundation and the Knight Foundation, as well as support from the Woodward Foundation and the Ohio Arts Council, to promote a year of national programming celebrating the 10th year of the Poets for Science initiative. Following the conference, Wick will promote and co-host a series of Poets for Science events in cities around the country throughout the 2026-27 academic year.