“Wild World, Wild Words”: A LitFest Keynote on Environmentalism and Writing at Helmerich Research Center Auditorium (OSU Tulsa) – Tulsa, OK

This year’s Tulsa LitFest keynotes will be delivered by Ada-based poet Ken Hada and visiting poet Daniela Naomi Molnar. Both authors have written extensively about the environment and nature, and their keynotes will address their personal relationship with the world outside and how their writing is influenced by it.

Statement from Ken Hada:

“As a working poet and literature professor, my writing often concerns the environment. My poetry and interpretive prose, reflecting my personal and professional selves, come together within ecological contexts. All writing, but poetry in particular, can offer emotional entry into an ecocritical mindset. Beyond abstraction, poetry provides an evocative way to unite agency with outcome. Writing within an ecological context brings identity and aesthetics into a satisfying, holistic relationship – what I call the “Natural Self” – a willful, individual vision of interdependency voiced in our writing. More than just contemplation, Natural Selves write as they live – with urgency – finding meaning in the moment, and voicing cautionary hope of tomorrow.”

Statement from Daniela Naomi Molnar:

Daniela Naomi Molnar is a poet and artist who creates with color, water, language, and place. Her primary medium is always place, specifically, the ways that places retain, transform, and transmit memories. She’ll be speaking about her current interdisciplinary work focused on planetary, cultural, familial, and personal memory. This work explores the histories and futures of “sacrifice zones” (clear cuts, concentration camps, dying glaciers). In these places, she gathers plants, rocks, specific waters, and bones, and she writes. In her studio, she transmutes these foraged materials into pigments for her art and memories for her writing. The resulting art and poetry are vessels of transformation in which grief might shift to love; difficult pasts to more peaceful futures. She’ll be speaking about language as a material and the transformative qualities of poetry.

This event will be feature a catered reception after the keynote addreses. Author books will be available for purchase.

Ken Hada

Ken Hada is a poet and professor at East Central University in Ada, Oklahoma where he directs the annual Scissortail Creative Writing Festival. Ken finds the natural order a powerful presence for writing. His work has received the 2022 Oklahoma Book Award, the 2017 SCMLA Poetry Prize, has been featured on The Writer’s Almanac, received the Western Heritage Award, named finalist for the Spur Award and six-time finalist for the Oklahoma Book Awards. In 2017 Ken gratefully accepted the Glenda Carlile Distinguished Service Award from the Oklahoma Center for the Book. His published poetry collections include: Visions for the Night, Come Before Winter, Feral Skies: Selected Poems 2008-2020, Contour Feathers, Sunlight & Cedar, Not Quite Pilgrims, Bring an Extry Mule, Persimmon Sunday, Spare Parts, Margaritas & Redfish, The Way of the Wind and The River White: A Confluence of Brush & Quill. The “Ken Hada Collection” is held at the Western History Collection Library at the University of Oklahoma. Ken enjoys reading his work at venues around the country.

https://kenhada.org/

Daniela Naomi Molnar

Daniela Naomi Molnar is a poet, artist, and writer who creates with color, water, language, and place. Her debut book, CHORUS, won the 2024 Oregon Book Award for Poetry and was selected by Kazim Ali as the winner of Omnidawn Press’s 1st/2nd Book Award. Her paintings are created with pigments she makes from plants, bones, stones, rainwater, and glacial melt. Forthcoming books include Memory of a Larger Mind (Omnidawn, 2028) and Light / Remains (Bored Wolves Press, 2026). Her book-length poem “Memory of a Larger Mind” accompanies photographs by Julian Stettler in The Glacier Is a Being (Sturm & Drang, 2023). Her work is anthologized in the forthcoming second volume of The Ecopoetry Anthology and in Breaking the Glass: A Contemporary Jewish Poetry Anthology from the Laurel Review. Molnar lives in Portland, Oregon and in the high deserts of the North American West.

www.danielamolnar.com / Instagram: @daniela_naomi_molnar

Additional sponsorship for this event provided by Tulsa Review.

Tulsa LitFest is brought to you by The Center for Poets and Writers, Tri City Collective, and Magic City Books.