Poetry in the Park 2022
Saturday, April 2nd
2:00 - 4:00 PM
Birmingham Botanical Gardens
2612 Lane Park Rd. Birmingam, AL
Join the Friends of Birmingham Botanical Gardens and Magic City Poetry Festival for a leisurely guided walking tour through the Birmingham Botanical Gardens while you enjoy the works of four Alabama poets.
Visitors are encouraged to join the fun as they encounter brief poetry readings between short strolls (five to ten minutes long).
Poets include Salaam Green, Halley Cotton, Matt Layne and the 2022 Magic City Poetry Festival Eco-Poetry Fellow, Nabila Lovelace. Nabila serves as the Earth Poet; she will be partnered with the National Parks Service and the Birmingham National Civil Rights Monument.
No registration required.
Free and open to the public, as always.
Scroll down for event poster.
“When it wasn’t profitable to bury
us you didn’t & that’s the story
of the ground.”
- Nabila Lovelace, 2022 Eco-Poetry Fellow
Nabila Lovelace is a first-generation Queens born poet, her people hail from Trinidad & Nigeria. Sons of Achilles, her debut book of poems, is out now through YesYes Books. She is honored to be the Magic City Poetry Festival 2022 Eco-Poetry Fellow. Most days you can find her kicking it in Tuscaloosa.
“There is one single purple flower creeping from the sidewalk in front of Ms. June’s house on 2nd Avenue.
The flower grows in the dark. Ms. June stands on the edge of her white, wooden triangular porch with tight, mauve slippers on her large feet. She tiptoes, waving her finger in the dense air through which cars speed — purple flower withstanding the wind.”
- Salaam Green, Outgoing Eco-Poet Fellow
Salaam Green, M.S. is an award-winning Poet and Author, Founder of Literary Healing Arts, 2020/21 Eco Poetry Fellow, A Reimagining Justice Fellow with the Southern Poverty Law Center, the 2016 Poet Laureate for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, and TEDx speaker Birmingham alum, social entrepreneur, and daughter of Alabama's Black Belt. As owner and founder of Literary Healing Arts and Red Couch Writers, she can be found helping others write to heal on red couches across the city as an expressive writer, Racial Healing Facilitator, and healer. She is a New Economy Coalition Climate Solutions Fellow and an advocate for environmental and restorative justice in rural Alabama. A writer and storyteller, who facilitates writing to heal workshops as an Artist in Residence with the Institute for Arts in Medicine her work has appeared in The Birmingham Times, Scalawag, Bust, Feminist Review, Black Youth Project, Elephant Journal, Southern Women’s Review, AL.com, Birmingham Arts Journal and more.
"Would you covet each kiss like the magnolia
clings to its withered blossom,
or give them recklessly as the honeybee
until nothing remains but the memory of sugar
and the soft sting of goodbye?
- Matt Layne
Poet and librarian Matt Layne was born in Birmingham but spent many of his most formative years living across the street from a swamp in Dothan, Alabama; not a figurative poetic swamp, but a real live moss-draped, cottonmouth infested, beaver-dammed, fallen-tree, methane squelching muddy swamp. He spent his childhood days traipsing through those woods, and much of what he found there influences the imagery of his poetry today. One of the first times he performed his poetry live was in downtown Birmingham with Dennis Hunt's Nappy Crow Feather Medicine Show; visual artists, performance artists, musicians, dancers, and poets all converged on a warehouse at Pepper Place to chant poems, spin prayer wheels, perform acrobatics, and dance. Within a year or two, Matt Layne helped found the improv poetry collective known as The Kevorkian Skull Poets which created poetry happenings around Birmingham. With members of the Skull Poets, he helped bring poetry slams to Birmingham in the mid-1990s. He shifted from slams to hosting poetry readings at local bookstores, most notably Lodestar Books and Greencup, and in the mid-oughts he became a librarian and helped to form the Word-Up Poetry Initiative for Jefferson County students.
Matt continues to write and read and promote poetry and literacy wherever he is. He has just finished a year of serving as a committee member of the Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature, and he is the President-elect of the Alabama Library Association. He served as the poetry editor for Steel Toe Review, a print and online journal of literature. His poetry collection, Miracle Strip, will be published by Brick Road Poetry Press later this year.
For those who read
lithology, these walls tell a history
of the Silurian dip and tectonic shifts.
But our glyphs read just our names and say
we once were here.
- Halley Cotton
Halley Cotton is the managing editor of the Birmingham Poetry Review, contributing editor for NELLE, and production manager for both publications. She is the founding director of the SPARK Writing Festival, and her work has appeared in places such as The Greensboro Review, Poetry South, and Smokelong Quarterly, among others. Cotton teaches freshman composition and literature courses at UAB. When she’s not busy kayaking or finding four-leaf clovers, she’s studying folklore and writing/reading poetry.
