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Lawrence Lenhart

Author
Lawrence Lenhart is the author of three essay collections, including The Well-Stocked and Gilded Cage, Safe Dry and Together, and Backvalley Ferrets. He wrote, composed, and produced the cowpunk fantasia, Pop Goes the Ferret! With Will Cordeiro, he is the author of two craft books, Experimental Writing and New Foundations of Creative Writing, both from Bloomsbury Academic. Lenhart teaches courses in fiction, nonfiction, climate science narrative, editing and publishing, and arts entrepreneurship at Northern Arizona University. Lenhart is an editor of DIAGRAM and Executive Director of the Northern Arizona Book Festival.

Contact: art.of.romanzo@gmail.com

Lawrence Lenhart's Presentations

Arizona/Southwest History

Environmental Humanities

Gathering Points: Cultural Geography on the Colorado Plateau

Kinłání & Kingman; Sedona & Seligman; Tuba City & Kachina Village; Winslow & Williams; Glen Canyon & Grand Canyon.

For millennia, these sites—and many more across the Colorado Plateau—have served as gathering points: physical, cultural, and storied. Drawing from the Northern Arizona Book Festival's literary field guide, Gathering Points, Lenhart considers how literature can become a form of cultural geography. With each poem or short prose piece geolocated to an exact latitude and longitude, the project calls its readers to community. These works trace the shapes of dilapidated houses, river-bend rescues, dark-sky trailheads, sacred mountain silhouettes, KTNN feed lines, USPS mail routes, craggy ash fields, water-drinking sinkholes, and the burled bark of ponderosa pines. This talk explores the possibilities—and responsibilities—of writing from place, and of using creative writing, GIS mapping, and creative placemaking to make visible the relationships between landscape and story.