Schedule of public events for Fall Semester 2022

Fall Term

• September 28 - Lisa Schlesinger, playwright - 5:00 pm Carrick Theater, Artist's Talk

• October 5 - Floracliff Nature Sanctuary - Service work field trip with breakfast - 9:00-11:00am

• October 26 – Greg Abernathy - Executive director of the Kentucky Natural Lands Trust, 5:00 pm Carrick Theater, Lecture

• November 10 – Ada Limón, US Poet Laureate - 5:30pm Carrick Theater - Reading, Q&A, book signing

• November 16 - Discussion of feature film, Woman at War, 7:00 on Zoom

Lisa Schlesinger will read from and discuss her new opera-theatre piece, Ruinous Gods: Suites for Sleeping Children, part of the Iphigenia Project, a multi-year multi-disciplinary series of works focused on the refugee crisis. Begun in 2012 and adapted from Euripides’ Iphigenia plays, the project uses film, music, theatre, and digital arts to respond to the refugee crisis and the global displacement of peoples.

Ruinous Gods, currently being created in collaboration with Lebanese violinist and composer Layale Chaker, is about seven displaced children who have uppgivenhetssyndrom, or resignation syndrome, a rare trauma response to the state of living in the limbo of displacement.

Lisa Schlesinger is a playwright and professor who co-heads the Iowa Playwrights Workshop at the University of Iowa. Her plays include Iphigenia Point Blank, the Celestial Bodies trilogy, The Bones of Danny Winston, Rock Ends Ahead, winner of the BBC International Playwriting Award, In the Wake of the Graybow Riots, and Twenty-one Positions with Naomi Wallace and Abdel Fattah AbuSrour. Her playwriting project, Endangered States of America, maps the ruins of ecosystems caused by climate change, neoliberalism and extreme capitalism, on the American landscape. She is also involved in long-term work with the Slow Theatre Project and with Climate Change Theater Action.

Greg Abernathy will discuss the importance of wildlands and why large landscape conservation is essential in the face of global biodiversity loss and the climate change crisis. He will highlight Kentucky’s unique biodiversity and the regional conservation efforts underway including Kentucky Natural Lands Trust’s Pine Mountain Wildlands Corridor, one of the largest conservation efforts in Kentucky’s history.

Greg is the Executive Director of Kentucky Natural Lands Trust, a Berea-based nonprofit working to protect, connect and restore wildlands. He provides strategic leadership and management of KNLT’s efforts ranging from land acquisition to partnerships and outreach to wildlands philanthropy. He has previous experience working for private, government and nonprofit conservation organizations both in Kentucky and throughout the Appalachian region. Greg's background is in forest ecology, geographic information systems (GIS) and design. He is the co-author of Kentucky’s Natural Heritage: An Illustrated Guide to Biodiversity and co-founder of the Pine Mountain Collective, a group of artists committed to wildlands conservation in Central Appalachia.