English Professor Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s poem has been selected for inclusion in Penguin/Random House’s recent anthology, “The Echoing Green: Poems of Fields, Meadows, and Grasses,” edited by Cecily Parks. The collection aims to address “…the rich poetic history of grass spans the centuries, from the pastoral poems of ancient Rome to the fields and prairies of the New World.” Also included in the anthology are Virgil, Bashō, Andrew Marvell, Christina Rossetti, Rainer Maria Rilke, Anna Akhmatova, Willa Cather, Seamus Heaney, Tomas Tranströmer, Sherman Alexie and Derek Walcott.
In February, Nezhukumatathil was a visiting writer at Davidson College in Davidson, N.C. She visited two classes and gave a campus-wide poetry reading.
On March 10, she was hosted by the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. and, with Academy of American Poets Chancellor Mark Doty, read ekphrastic poems inspired by the Phillips Collection entitled “Seeing Nature.” The exhibition explores the evolution of European and American landscape art. Highlights include Jan Brueghel the Younger's 17th century allegorical paintings of the five senses, five Monet landscapes spanning 30 years, evocative works by Paul Cézanne and Gustav Klimt, and modern and contemporary perspectives by 20th century artists as diverse as Georgia O'Keeffe and Edward Hopper.
