The longevity of artistic praxis depends on our ability to confront and harmonize with the intrusions in us and around us.
Former US-Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith wrote in The New York Times, "CAConrad's poems invite the reader to become an agent in a joint act of recovery, to step outside of passivity and propriety and to become susceptible to the illogical and the mysterious."
Please join us to explore how (Soma)tic Poetry Rituals can help us see the creative viability in everything around us. CAConrad has created writing rituals using the night sky to design homemade star constellations, another ritual to dream beside crows, and many others, from talking with trees and ghosts, translating Shakespeare's sonnets with crystals, coping with the destroyed wilderness of our planet, and a special ritual to overcome a debilitating depression after the rape and murder of their boyfriend. It turns out that falling in love with the world as it is, not as it was, is our best lens for moving onward.
CAConrad has worked with the ancient technologies of poetry and ritual since 1975. Their latest book is Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return (Wave Books / UK Penguin 2024). They received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a PEN Josephine Miles Award, a Creative Capital grant, a Pew Fellowship, and a Lambda Award. The Book of Frank is now available in 9 different languages, and they coedited SUPPLICATION: Selected Poems of John Wieners (Wave Books). They exhibit poems as art objects with recent solo shows in Tucson, Arizona, as well as in Spain and Portugal. They teach at the Sandberg Art Institute in Amsterdam. Please visit them at
https://linktr.ee/CAConrad88