Poet, scholar, environmentalist and activist, Ann Fisher Wirth will read from and discuss her latest collection of poetry Paradise is Jagged.
 In this collection, writes Catherine Pierce,2021-2025 Mississippi Poet Laureate, “Ann Fisher-Wirth looks levelly at mortality, grief, and memory, and reckons with what it is to be urgently alive, bringing her incisive nuance to subjects ranging from the loss of a beloved sister to Mississippi's Parchman Penitentiary to our imperiled natural world to the comforts of marital love. In "Wooden Comb," Fisher-Wirth writes, "I cannot reconcile how the world is sweet, how the world is burning." Paradise Is Jagged is too wise a book to promise impossible reconciliation. Instead it offers a benediction of sorts: Walk with me through this difficult and tender place, it says. Willingly, gratefully, we do.”

Bio:
 
Ann Fisher-Wirth is the author of six previous books of poetry, including The Bones of Winter Birds (Terrapin Books, 2019) and Mississippi, a poetry/photography collaboration with Maude Schuyler Clay (Wings Press, 2018). With Laura-Gray Street, she coedited The Ecopoetry Anthology (Trinity UP, 2013). Her awards include three Mississippi Arts Commission Poetry Fellowships and the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Poetry Prize. Recently she coedited a collection of eco-writing and eco-art from Africa, Asia, Latin America, Oceania, and the American South with Laura-Gray Street and regional editors Mildred Barya, Esther Vincent, Juan Carlos Galeano, and Craig Santos Perez, for the journal The Global South. A senior fellow and board member of the Black Earth Institute, she is newly retired from the University of Mississippi, where she taught in the MFA program and directed the Environmental Studies program. She lives in Oxford, Mississippi.

UUCO is a welcoming congregation and invite you to join us for services this Sunday at 10:30 am either in person or online.  Unfortunately, we are unable to publish the link to the service.  You may contact Sandra Moss at [email protected] to have the link sent to you.  Please request link before Sunday.

Poet and teacher Lisa Dordal will share insights from her own spiritual journey about the transformative power of poetry, meditation, and mysticism. Lisa is a Writer-in-Residence at Vanderbilt University and is the author of two collections of poetry, Mosaic of the Dark, which was a finalist for the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry, and Water Lessons. Her third collection, Next Time You Come Home, is forthcoming in September. 
 

Lisa Dordal holds a Master of Divinity and a Master of Fine Arts (in poetry), both from Vanderbilt University, and teaches in the English Department at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of Mosaic of the Dark, which was a finalist for the 2019 Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry; Water Lessons, which was listed by Lambda Literary as one of their most anticipated books for 2022; and Next Time You Come Home (2023). Lisa is a Pushcart Prize and Best-of-the-Net nominee and the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize, the Robert Watson Poetry Prize, and the Betty Gabehart Poetry Prize. Her poetry has appeared in The Sun, Narrative, Christian Century, Image, The New Ohio Review, Best New Poets, Greensboro Review, and CALYX. Her website is lisadordal.com.
 
UUCO is a welcoming congregation and invites you to join us this Sunday for services at 10:30 am. either in person or online.  Unfortunately we are unable to publish the link to the service due to security concerns.  Please contact Sandra Moss at [email protected] to have the link sent to you.  Please request link before Sunday.