Poet and facilitator Karen McCarthy Woolf is running a poetry workshop on the nature poem, discussing poems from today’s leading Black, Asian, and global-majority voices on the natural world. This workshop aims to explore what the nature poem is and what it can be.

Poems for this workshop will be sourced from ‘Nature Matters: Vital Poems from the Global Majority’, a new anthology edited by Karen McCarthy Woolf and Mona Arshi.

Karen McCarthy Woolf will explore some of today’s urgent and inspirational poems engaging with the natural world by Black, Asian and global-majority poets in the UK. Nature matters everywhere and for everyone and everything. Inclusivity and a variety of perspectives and approaches are vital to challenge our habitual thinking and to drive the much needed change in our treatment of and views on nature.

Widespread environmental destruction and climate change sit alongside toxic narratives around race, migration and people who leave one land for another. It sits alongside ancient Indigenous wisdom and cultural histories that have had to fight to survive the sharp end of colonisation. How can we expand our own perspectives on nature and history? How can we attune our attention to voices and perspectives that challenge conventional ideas of nature as an extractive resource or aestheticised other?

Through a combination of close reading, writing exercises and group discussion Karen will lead a bespoke workshop designed to broaden our perception of what a nature poem is and can be.  Poems for this workshop will be sourced from Nature Matters: Vital Poems from the Global Majority edited by Mona Arshi and Karen McCarthy Woolf (Faber, 2025).

Dr Karen McCarthy Woolf, recently shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize 2024 for Top Doll (Dialogue Books), was born in London to English and Jamaican parents. She is the author of three poetry books and the editor of numerous literary anthologies. Karen's University of London doctoral research explored ways in which poetry might challenge a Eurocentric bias in ecopoetics. As a postdoctoral Fulbright Scholar at UCLA, she was writer in residence at the Promise Institute for Human Rights. Her debut An Aviary of Small Birds (Carcanet Press, 2014), was an Observer Book of the Year and her second collection, Seasonal Disturbances (Carcanet Press, 2017), was a winner in the inaugural Laurel Prize for ecopoetry. McCarthy Woolf has performed her work worldwide – in the US, Caribbean, Asia and across Europe at venues including the Royal Festival Hall, Barbican and Kings Place for Poetica Electronica, which showcased music collaborations with various dance and techno producers. Her poems have been translated into Turkish, Swedish, Spanish, Polish and Dutch, produced as an animated and choreographed short film, exhibited by Poems on the Underground and dropped from a helicopter over the Houses of Parliament. 

2 hours long

Start time: 9am UK time // 5pm Perth Australia // 7.30pm Adelaide // 6.30 Darwin // 7pm Brisbane // 8pm Sydney, AEST // 10pm NZ

Times on the homepage of this site are in London, UK Timezone, but when you add the event to your calendar it should be correct for your local time zone.

You can check your timezone against London UK time here: https://greenwichmeantime.com/time-gadgets/time-zone-converter/

Cost £28 GBP (with cost effective exchange via STRIPE)

Zoom link and materials will be sent by email at least 2 days prior. If you don’t receive it get in touch with me.

More events here https://www.cathdrake.com

This event will be recorded. Our workshops are intended as live and interactive. However, there are a couple of tickets for those keen to come who cannot make the date of this workshop that are 'recording only' tickets to be purchased in advance ONLY for those who can't make the date. If you buy a live ticket and don't turn up on the day, you can't access the recording – sorry, it's not a fall back. You can buy a live OR recorded ticket. This is because we primarily want poets to come and participate in live workshops. 'Recording only' tickets allow access to listen to a recording of the workshop during the 2 weeks following the workshop. (Note that we may share the recording at a future time to new participants.)