Join us in partnership with Friends of the Library for a Virtual Authors Series event with Mel Michelle Lewis ’02.
Mel Michelle Lewis, Ph.D., is lead coach and consultant with the Art of Change Agency, cultivating critical voices and creative visions for sustainable practice, structural change, environmental justice, and social transformation. Previously, they provided strategic creative visions for the future of clean water for people and nature as vice president for people, justice, and cultural affairs at American Rivers.
Lewis served as associate professor and director of the Ecosystems, Sustainability, and Justice Program, co-founded the Space for Creative Black Imagination: An Interdisciplinary Making and Research Institute, and chaired the Humanistic Studies Department at Maryland Institute College of Art. They chaired the Center for Geographies of Justice; the Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies Department; and the Africana Studies Department at Goucher College, as well as the Department of Ethnic Studies at Saint Mary’s College of California.
Rooted in the Gulf South’s folklore, dialect, foodways, music, art, and landscapes, Lewis’ creative work explores nature writing themes in rural coastal settings through the lens of Black, Creole, and AfroIndigenous knowledges. Raised in Bayou La Batre, on the Alabama Gulf Coast, their multimedia projects and creative writing portraiture feature ancestral lands, generational lineages, and queer longings in frontline Gulf South communities. Their book, Biomythography Bayou, is available via the Griot Project Book Series at Bucknell University Press. Their forthcoming project Waterbody is supported by American Bird Conservancy‘s Afrofuturism Collective and Re:wild.
Lewis serves on the board of Orion Magazine: Nature and Culture and Greens REALIGN.
Our moderator is Professor Emeritus Angelo Robinson.
Registration is no longer available because the registration deadline has passed.
