After the Dome Fire A Desert Poetry Reading by Ruth Nolan

59700 Twentynine Palms Highway,Joshua Tree CA 92252

30 October, 2022

Description

~ FREE ~ Location: Friendship Hall at the Joshua Tree Retreat Center Join former desert wildland firefighter Ruth Nolan – currently serving as the Mojave Desert Poet Laureate – for a reading of eco-poetry from her new poetry book, After the Dome Fire (Bamboo Dart Press,) winner of the 1st Runner Up award in the 2021 Hilary Gravendyk Poetry Book award. Each poem touches on and weaves throughout themes of a life spent in the rural Mojave: motherhood, loss, the work of caring for the desert through the work of firefighting, and renewal via the beautiful-harsh landscape of the Mojave Desert – Ruth’s lifelong home – and examines the impacts and recoveries of the 2020 Dome Fire in the East Mojave National Preserve. The reading will be followed immediately by a conversation with Cheryl Montelle, longtime curator of the Morongo Basin’s Other Desert Stories reading / performance series and MilTree. The Joshua Tree Retreat Center and Joshua Tree Folk School are proud to present this reading with Ruth Nolan, as part of their artist residency program. About Ruth Nolan: Ruth Nolan grew up in the Mojave Desert’s Victor Valley and is professor of creative writing at College of the Desert. She is author of a new poetry book, After the Dome Fire (Bamboo Dart Press), and her writing has been most recently and notably published in Boom: California; KCET Los Angeles; McSweeney’s; Joshua Tree: Where Two Deserts Meet (Wildsam National Parks) and Writing the Golden State: The New Literary Terrain of California (Angel City Press, 2023). A California desert literature scholar, she is editor of No Place for a Puritan: The Literature of California’s Deserts (Heyday Books) and curator of the humanities project Fire on the Mojave: Stories from the Deserts and Mountains of Inland Southern California, based in part on her experiences fighting wildfire for the USFS and BLM CA Desert District. Her writing has been supported by a 2022 Joshua Tree Folk School Residency and also previously by the California Residency at Yefe Nof, Breadloaf, and California Humanities. She is founder and instructor of the Writing Your Inner Desert workshop at the Desert Institute at Joshua Tree National park and co-founder of the Inlandia Institute creative workshop program.