From 6:30-8:30 p.m. Wednesday, April 22 Carpenter Nature Center’s Wisconsin campus near Hudson will host a poetry reading to mark Earth Day. Fifty-six years after Wisconsin’s US Sen. Gaylord Nelson inaugurated Earth Day, the reading, sponsored by Tropical Wings, brings together three outstanding regional poets in defense of the earth.

Maureen Ash, River Falls, has loved horses, being outside, and writing about both for most of her life. Her memoir, “Holding the Lines: Horses, Hard Work, Love, and Potatoes,” was published in late 2023. Atina Diffley has said of her book, “It’s immediate and real, powerfully tender, heart-breaking, and above all, inspirational.” She has been called a “masterful storyteller.”   

Ardie Buckholtz Medina is an Anishinaabe poet and playwright from Lac du Flambeau. Her poems have been published in various periodicals, and two self-published anthologies, “Gatherings and In the Company of Others,” with fellow poets from the Loft Literary Center’s former Foreword Apprenticeship program. Ardie lives in Northeast Minneapolis with her husband Mike and their two Affenpinschers, Chito and Sundae.

Thomas R. Smith, River Falls, has published many poems on environmental themes, as well as a prose book called “Poetry on the Side of Nature: Writing the Nature Poem as an Act of Survival” (2022). He and his UWRF teacher Jim Lenfestey helped celebrate the first Earth Day in River Falls in 1970. His poems frequently observe and record the natural history of the Kinnickinnic River.   

The reading will take place at the Carpenter Nature Center’s Wisconsin Visitors Center.  The event is free and refreshments will be provided.  The main reading will be followed by an “open mike” during which those attending are invited to read a favorite poem of their own or someone else’s or simply listen and enjoy. The Carpenter Nature Center is located at 279 South Cove Road, Hudson. Phone: 651-437-4359. Visitors are invited to come early and explore the Center’s grounds and trails.  

Submitted by Thomas R. Smith