The sound of birds out a window offers more than ambient potential—it transforms and expands a room and a moment, creating place-making connections across language and species. This transcendent transmission of feeling is also part of the work of poetry, as it helps guide its readers and writers into a deeper awareness of the interconnections that bind all life across time and distance into an intricate ecosystem of interdependence, responsibility, and care.
Neighbird combines poetry, simultaneous tactile practice, and learning in a celebration of mutual dependence and the capacity to share and connect in spontaneous ways. Through the combination of active and generative making with poetic study and documentation, Neighbird asks participants to expand their understanding of community and shared habitat, to consider themselves in relation to, and their place and responsibility within this environment.
Contributor Bios
Chia-Lun Chang is the author of One Day We Become Whites (ND/SA, 2016). Recent work appears in the Asiya Wadud:Echo Exhibit, Sink Review, Apogee, Brooklyn Poets, and Poetry Society of America. A Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, she has received support from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Tofte Lake Center, Cave Canem Workshop, Vermont Studio Center and Poets House. Chia-Lun teaches contemporary Taiwanese poetry at the Brooklyn Public Library and writes for chatbots. Born and raised in New Taipei City, Taiwan, she lives in New York City. Learn more about her at chialunchang.com.
Maureen Owen's latest title is Edges of Water from Chax Press. She can be found reading her work on PennSound. Her affiliations are Telephone Books and zine, The Poetry Project at St. Mark's, Naropa University and zine not enough night.
Sam White taught at an afterschool art program in New York City. Her work has been published in FORTUNE, “a project by and for queer Asian publics” and she prints chapbooks under Topless Press. She has read her writing to live audiences about 5 times in the last 2 years, and spent time at the Mount Lebanon Residency.
Saretta Morgan’s current work uses text, etching, sculpture, and video to engage relationships between ecology, Black diaspora and migration in the United States Southwest. She lives between Phoenix and Mohave Valley, Arizona. Saretta is author of the chapbooks, Feeling Upon Arrival (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018) and room for a counter interior (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs, 2017). She has received support from the Jerome Foundation, Arizona Commission on the Arts, Headlands Center for the Arts, the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, Virginia Piper Foundation, and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, among others. Recent work can be found at Triple Canopy, The Colorado Review, and Academy of American Poets.
About Neighbird
Neighbird is a project of The Poetry Project, in partnership with The Feminist Bird Club and teaching artist Sam White. Sign-up here to get involved and receive a packet in the mail containing the following: (1) directions designed to inspire you to creatively build your own bird feeders, (2) educational materials for bird identification and bird habitat conservation, and (3) a packet of poems modeling engagement with birds
Graphic design and programming by Raphaël Bastide, with the typefaces Free Serif, Barlow, Routed Gothic, Honoka Mincho and Computer Modern Typewriter.