An Evening of Story and Sound in the Urban Forest

Lostintheletters and Trees Atlanta Present: An Evening of Story and Sound in the Urban Forest with Janisse Ray, Iman Person, Christopher Martin, Becca Rogriguez, and Erin Palovick

Join Lostintheletters and Trees Atlanta for a night of live readings and dynamic sound art presentations. The reading gives audience members the opportunity to gain inspiration by absorbing the work of presenting authors. Each reader will have fifteen minutes to present their work. Two sound artists will present brief soundscapes that echo the sounds we hear in the Atlanta ecosystem. We will facilitate a brief Q&A with the authors at the conclusion of the readings.

Readings by:

Janisse Ray is an award-winning American author who explores nature and culture in her work. Her environmental memoir Ecology of a Cracker Childhood chronicled the story of growing up in the disappearing longleaf pine flatwoods. It was a New York Times Notable, is widely read, and is credited with bringing attention to an iconic and critically endangered ecosystem. That was followed by eleven other books. Her latest is a manual on writing, Craft & Current. She has won many awards, including an American Book Award, Pushcart Prize, Southern Booksellers Award, Southern Environmental Law Center Writing Award, Nautilus Award, and Eisenberg Award. Her collection of essays, Wild Spectacle, received the Donald L. Jordan Prize for Literary Excellence, which carries a $10,000 prize. Her books have been translated into Turkish, French, and Italian. Ray lives on a farm inland from Savannah, Georgia. She loves dark chocolate, the blues, and wildflowers. Find out more at her website, janisseray.com or subscribe to her popular free Substack newsletter, “Trackless Wild.”

Iman Person is a Jamaican-American interdisciplinary artist and cultural anthropologist whose work bridges ancestral memory and contemporary ritual. Rooted in eco-somatics and Black futurity, she creates immersive installations using earth, sound, scent, and video to reconnect the body to cyclical time. Drawing from the Bakongo Cosmogram and ancestral technologies, her practice cultivates portals for reflection, healing, and community engagement. Through altar-making and sensory storytelling, Iman challenges linear views of time and technology, offering art as a living archive—a software for the current generation. Her work invites audiences into a felt experience of history, land, and the unseen forces that shape us.

Christopher Martin is author of the poetry collection Firmament, for which he received the Wandering Aengus Book Award, and the essay collection This Gladdening LIght, for which he received the Georgia Author of the Year Award in Memoir and the Will D. Campbell Award in Creative Nonfiction. Chris’s work has appeared in numerous journals and media including On Being, McSweeney's, Thrush, Ruminate, Still, Fourth River, and Loose Change. His works-in-progress include a poetry manuscript titled Fawn and a creative nonfiction manuscript titled Vision of the Unicorn Ghost. He lives in northwest Georgia and teaches composition and literature at Kennesaw State. 

Sound installation pieces by:

Becca Rodriguez is a cross-disciplinary artist from Florida/Georgia currently based in Brooklyn. Recently, Becca was a volunteer at the Amphibian Foundation in Atlanta. Watery eggs and earthen vessels are persistent motifs in Becca’s ceramic, textile, and sonic installations, becoming elemental altarwork to extant, extinct, and fictitious ecosystems. Becca has recently shared work and music at The Museum of Contemporary Art Georgia, Atlanta Contemporary, and Ger-Art Gallery. In 2024, Becca was a resident artist at The Watermill Center in Watermill, NY collecting field recordings, foraged pigments, and interviews for an interactive sound map of the East End of Long Island.

Erin Palovick is an interdisciplinary artist and educator based in New York. Her practice lies at the intersection of collaboration, social engagement, and research. The gesture of listening is central to Palovick’s work as it engages with play and reaching into knowledge beyond absoluteness. Palovick has taught across disciplines at the University of Illinois at Chicago and  Georgia State University, and is currently a part-time instructor at The New School in NYC. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, including exhibitions at Day & Night Projects, The High Museum, MOCA, The Atlanta Contemporary, and the Athens Institute for Contemporary Arts.

Additional Information:

Lostintheletters is an Atlanta-based 501(c)(3) organization that empowers community members to effectively and artistically amplify their stories and experiences through creative writing and literacy empowerment. Founded in 2012, Lostintheletters builds and sustains Atlanta's literary community to be a place of vital creative communication and exchange through low-cost, high-quality education programs, including weekly Writing Studio Hours, the quarterly-presented Reading & Workshop Series, and the annual Letters Festival. The organization believes communities and individuals thrive when they have equitable access to opportunities to develop their skills and knowledge.

City in a Forest Certification: The City Forest Certification is Trees Atlanta’s newest community action program. This hands on program is designed to guide and empower everyday people with practical knowledge and skills. Neighbor by neighbor and property by property, we can grow and connect a network of forests big and small. By attending this program you can earn 1 Acorn towards your City Forest Certification

• Doors open at 6:30 PM
• Getting Here: Bike racks are located on the side of the building (near the silo in the Picnic Patio). We are approximately 1 mile from the Oakland City and West End MARTA train stations (Red and Gold Lines). Limited number of parking spaces are available at our location, in addition to limited street parking. Lee & White is accessible via a walk on the Atlanta Beltline for those who plan to eat there before or after this event.
• Registration Required. Register for this event through our partners at Lost in Letters here. The cost of this event is a sliding scale: $0 -$40. Register here. 
• Safety and Cancellation Policy: Learn more about our current Safety Protocols for In-Person Education Events.
• Questions: If you have any questions or comments regarding this event, please email ZWR1Y2F0aW9uIHwgdHJlZXNhdGxhbnRhICEgb3Jn. Replies to this email may require up to 2 business days. The Trees Atlanta TreeHouse office hours are Monday through Friday (8:30 am - 4:30 pm). For questions day of this event, please contact the Adult Education Coordinator directly at 843-901-3635

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https://www.lostintheletters.org/

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