“Conveying Meaning”

“Conveying Meaning”
With Kristen Miller, Michelle Lopez, and Kathleen Driskell

Friday, April 30, 6 p.m.

Hermitage Artist Retreat Beach, 6660 Manasota Key Road, Englewood, FL 34223

Visual and interdisciplinary artist Michelle Lopez will share how she conveys what social justice means to her through visual mixed media. Kristen Miller translates poetry, conveying meaning from the original language. Learn about this delicate transfer of meaning between cultures. Writer Kathleen Driskell will show how the punctuation you learned in English class can be used to enrich prose and deepen literary meaning.

Registration ($5 per person) is required.

Capacity is limited to accommodate safe social distancing. Early reservations are recommended. Masks required at registration, and the Hermitage requests that masks be worn for all live programs, including outdoor events.Audience members are invited to bring their own beach chairs and blankets.

Kristen Renee Miller’s poems and translations have appeared in POETRY, The Kenyon Review, The Common,Guernica, and Best New Poets 2018. She is the translator of Spawn (2020), by Ilnu Nation poet Marie-Andrée Gill. A recipient of fellowships and awards from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and the American Literary Translators Association, she lives in Louisville, Kentucky, where she is the managing editor for Sarabande.

Michelle Lopez is an interdisciplinary sculptor and installation artist. As a builder, conceptualist, and manipulator of materials, Lopez inventively explores cultural phenomenon, stretching to their limits the industrial processes that craft consumerism in its many forms: she bends plywood to make body-sized wilted skateboards, mirrors glass to build smoke clouds out of silver nitrate, manufactures heavy gold thrones out of slender lead tendrils. Lopez’s gimlet eye examines collapsed political and social structures by inverting cultural tropes through the process of building, exploiting industrial materials to expose the hidden boundaries of embedded societal constructions. Lopez was a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2019 and had a solo show at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in Philadelphia (September 2019 – May 2020). ‍She has taught at University of California Berkeley, Yale School of Art, the School of Visual Arts, and is director of Sculpture & Installation in the Fine Arts Program at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

Kathleen Driskell is chair of the School of Creative and Professional Writing at Spalding University, and the author of the poetry collections Blue Etiquette: Poems, a finalist for the Weatherford Award; Next Door to the Dead, a Kentucky Voices selection by the University Press of Kentucky and winner of the 2018 Judy Gaines Young Book Award; Seed Across Snow, a Poetry Foundation national bestseller; Laughing Sickness, and Peck and Pock: A Graphic Poem. Her awards include grants from the Kentucky Arts Council and the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and she has received prizes from the Associated Writing Programs and Frankfort Arts Foundation. She currently serves as chair of the board of directors of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. Driskell received her MFA in creative writing from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Kathleen Driskell’s residency made possible by the Annette Dignam State College of Florida Residency in Literature at the Hermitage.