Poetry Reading Series – Nomi Stone

Have you ever read poetry that uses fieldwork and archives to deal with important social and political concerns? Come hear three acclaimed poets who employ research and reporting to grapple with such timely issues as immigration, identity, cultural appropriation, racism and the military- and prison-industrial complexes. Their works intersect with the social sciences, drawing on anthropology, sociology, history, media studies, education, psychology, political science and law.

• Thursday, Feb. 16, Susan Briante
• Tuesday, Feb. 28, Nomi Stone
• Thursday, March 30, Paisley Rekdal

All readings are free and open to the public.

The series is sponsored by the Department of English and Creative Writing at The University of Tulsa, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Oklahoma Center for the Humanities and the Tulsa Artist Fellowship.

Nomi Stone’s writing is born at the crossroads of her two fields of expertise: poetry and anthropology. Her poetry book Kill Class (2019) and her scholarly text Pinelandia: An Anthropology and Field Poetics of War and Empire (2022) stem from her field research across the United States and the Middle East. By investigating war games in mock Middle Eastern villages that serve as military training sites for cultural literacy and special operations, Stone presents a piercing look at the American empire and the consequences of the global war on terror. NPR writes of Kill Class, “[Stone] is able to make this anthropological excavation into something both beautiful and haunting.” At The University of Tulsa, she will also talk about pushing against the binary opposition between research and poetry or fieldwork and life.

Artist bio

Poet and anthropologist Nomi Stone is the author of three books, most recently the poetry collection Kill Class (Tupelo, 2019), finalist for the Julie Suk Award, and the ethnography Pinelandia: An Anthropology and Field Poetics of War and Empire (University of California Press, 2022), a finalist for the Atelier award. Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic, Poetry Magazine, American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, The Nation, The New Republic and elsewhere. She has a Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia and a master’s degree in poetry from Warren Wilson. She was a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton. Stone is currently an assistant professor of poetry at the University of Texas, Dallas.