Author Biography
Jourdan Imani Keith is a Black Arts Legacies 2023 awardee and Seattle’s 2019- 2022 Civic Poet. Featured in Forbes and on NPR, her Orion Magazine essays, “Desegregating Wilderness” and “At Risk” appear in the Best American Science and Nature Writing Anthology, as well as textbooks. The founder of Urban Wilderness Project she leads its R U An Endangered Species™ Women and Whales First: Poetry in a Climate of Change campaign which features the podcast series of the same name. Her TEDx Talk, “Your Body of Water” became the theme for King County's 2016-2018 Poetry on Buses which received a 2018 Americans for the ARTS award and the 2022 US Water Alliance Outstanding Artist prize. Her plays, The Uterine Files, Episodes I and II, premiered in Seattle at Langston Hughes Performing Arts Institute in May of 2024. Featured by Seattle Public Library as part its Seattle Reads celebration of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Keith’s genre-bending Afrofuturistic choreopoem carries our bodies of water from enslavement to intergalactic resistance.
Poems
Region
North Puget Sound