Megan Kaminski is the author of three books of poetry, Gentlewomen (Noemi Press, 2020), Deep City (Noemi Press, 2015) and Desiring Map (Coconut Books, 2012). She is also the author of Prairie Divination (Sunseen Books, 2022), a book of illustrated essays and oracle deck in collaboration with artist L. Ann Wheeler, and Quietly Between (A Viewing Space, 2022), a co-authored collection of poetry and photography. A Professor in the English Department’s Creative Writing Program and in the Environmental Studies Program with a courtesy appointment in Visual Art at the University of Kansas, she specializes in poetry, ecopoetics, the plant humanities, and eco-arts and writing practices.
Her current book project, Blazing Star, explores the healing modalities of plants and the liberatory possibilities of radical tenderness through a poetics of care with and for the more-than-human world. The poems reimagine interspecies communication and nonhuman encounters through a speculative poetics of transcorporeal embodiments in “thick time.” Through listening and interspecies avuncular care, she develops individual relationships, conversing through hand and voice, water and soil, leaf and flower, breeze and song. This care blossoms into speculative permutations of the body and self through an exploration of trauma, healing, and the more-than-human relationships we are always already engaging in, visioning new possibilities for reciprocity and community.
Her research is informed by scholarship in queer ecology, plant studies, somatics, disability studies, eco-cultural studies, and the environmental arts and humanities. Informed by interdisciplinary research in social welfare, plant biology, and philosophy, as well as previous work in the healing arts and at non-profit environmental organizations, her creative work and scholarship aim to undo the cultures of dominance and exploitation that have brought us to this current moment of ecological crisis and inequality.
“Under tree canopy” from Plant-Human Quarterly ‘s Summer Solstice Reading
