JNT Dialogue: Speaker Series

JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory Presents Erin Sharkey, writer and editor of A Darker Wilderness: Black Nature Writing from Soil to Stars, and Tia-Simone Gardner, co-curator of A Nation Takes Place: Navigating Race and Water in Contemporary Art, who will talk about their shared practices of finding self in place, and about how we narrativize our relationships to archives, landscapes, and historical voids.

 

Erin Sharkey is a writer, arts and abolition organizer, cultural worker, and film producer based in Minneapolis. Sharkey edited the anthology, A Darker Wilderness: Black Nature Writing from Soil to Stars, published by Milkweed Editions. Sharkey's writing is featured in We Are Meant to Rise (UMN Press), A Nation Takes Place (UMN Press), Queer Voices: Prose, Poetry, and Pride (MN Historical Society Press), and Sparked: George Floyd, Racism and the Progressive Illusion (MN Historical Society Press). She has an MFA in creative writing from Hamline University, and teaches at Minneapolis College and with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop (MPWW), and has received fellowships and residencies from the Loft Mentor Series, VONA/Voices, the Givens Foundation, Coffee House Press, the Bell Museum of Natural History, the Jerome Foundation and the Black Seed Fellowship from Black Visions and the Headwaters Foundation. Sharkey is a steward cooperative member of the Fields at Rootsprings Retreat, a land-based Cooperative stewarding space for the healing and development of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) artists, activists, healers, and community centering Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, and Queer (LGBTQ) folx in Central Minnesota.

 

 

 

Tia-Simone Gardner is an artist, educator, and Black feminist learner. Her hybrid practice enacts the Black geographic, long histories - some documented, some not -between black folks and the fabricated environment. Gardner grew up in Fairfield, Alabama and received her BA in Art and Art History from the University of Alabama in Birmingham. In 2009 she received her MFA in Interdisciplinary Practices and Time-Based Media from the University of Pennsylvania. She participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program as a Studio Fellow and has been an invited artist at a number of national and international artist residencies including the Center for Photography at Woodstock, A Studio in the Woods, and IASPIS Sweden. She was awarded a number of fellowships including a recent Smithsonian Artist Fellowship in 2020. In 2018, Gardner received a Phd in Feminist Studies from the University of Minnesota where she completed a practice-based dissertation on Black folks, mobility and the history of small (now tiny) house practices, titled: 'Sensing Place: HouseScale, Black Geographies, and a Humanly Workable City.' She's currently working on a project about Fairfield, her elders, and the geologic time that made her home(town) a profitable racial landscape for the US Steel. Alongside this work, she continues to teach and develop projects related to rivers, particularly, the Mississippi River, and maritime history through her work on a series of floating camera obscuras, developing a practice of social photography.

Details:

Date: March 13th, 2025

Time: 6:30 - 8 pm.

Location: Halle Library Auditorium, G03 (Basement level)

ASL interpretation will be provided.

LBC Credits will be available for this event.

 

Parking information for guests:

We recommend that guests to campus use the Mid Campus/Bowen field pay parking lot. Alternately, you can also find parking at McKenney Lot and Student Center Lot. A limited number of parking passes will be available at the event for complimentary parking. Please feel free to contact [email protected] by Mar. 3^rd to reserve one in advance.