Lyric Empathy: Workshop featuring Tess Taylor with Christopher Schell

Tess Taylor is the author of five celebrated poetry collections including The Misremembered World, The Forage House, Last West: Roadsongs for Dorothea Lange, and Rift Zone (named a 2020 Boston Globe best book), and Work & Days (a 2016 NY Times best poetry book). A staged adaptation of LAST WEST, her book of poems about Dorothea Lange will launched to sold out performances at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art in 2026. Her next book, Come Bite, will be published by Milkweed Press in 2027. Her work as a cultural critic appears in Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic, CNN, The New York Times, and more. She has taught widely, from UC Berkeley to Queen’s University in Belfast, and served as on air poetry reviewer for NPR’s All Things Considered for over a decade. She recently published her first full length poetry anthology: Leaning Toward Light: Poems for Gardens and the Hands that Tend Them, a collection of contemporary gardening poems for an era of climate crisis. A staged adaptation of her book of poems about Dorothea Lange will launch at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art in 2025. Her next book, Come Bite, will be published in 2026. She lives and gardens just outside Berkeley, California Tess was awarded an Academy of American Poets’ Poet Laureate Fellowship in 2024 and served as the Poet Laureate of El Cerrito, California, where she hosted literary events in schools and community centers. Read about the Poet Laureate Project here.

Dr. Christopher J. Schell is an Assistant Professor, Department of Environmental Science, Policy, & Management at UC Berkeley as well as an urban ecologist, professor, Afrofuturist, father, and writer. Research in the Schell Lab combines animal behavior, physiology, urban biodiversity conservation, environmental justice, and One Health to investigate how carnivores – namely coyotes, foxes, and raccoons – adapt to life in cities. In addition, Schell’s lab integrates critical discourses on how structural oppression (e.g., redlining, pollution burden, and socioeconomic disparities) directly shape the very urban features associated with human-wildlife interactions, conflict, and adaptation. This transdisciplinary work aims to disentangle how environmental injustices have structured our urban ecosystems and how we can harness those lessons to build more just, biodiverse, and resilient cities. Schell is a National Geographic Explorer, Grist Fixer, Cal Academy Fellow and Board Member, and Affiliate Faculty with the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, with his work featured in The Atlantic, The New York Times, Vox Explained, and various NPR radio events. A born-and-raised Los Angeleno now firmly planted in the Bay Area, Schell weaves his lived experiences as a Black man and Californian to co-produce justice- and equity-centered research programs with local communities that regenerate urban nature, environmental health, and access for all peoples. https://cjschell.com/about

“Making: the act and process of creating. Making that requires mental and physical attention engages proprioception, allows the sensation of body-being-in-place. This might mean handwork––writing by hand, or manipulating objects that represent language in space or sound rather than in mind on or onscreen. It might mean interspersring meditation or movement with writing,  or practicing craft with physical products—whittling, knitting, repair—in tandem with poetic practice…. Making may …help restore the relationship between the maker and their tools; the maker and their time; a maker and what they make.  Such labor may also help restore and maintain the relationship between the maker and the places where they make.” 

-Counter-Descecration, A Glossary for Writing Within the Anthropocene  (Linda Russo and Marthe Reed, eds.)