This free virtual event is one of a series of programs presented nationally by member organizations of the Poetry Coalition. This event will be captioned
With poets Camille T. Dungy and Marina Carreira, environmental activists Maria Lopez-Nuñez and Dr. Jalonne L. White-Newsome; moderated by filmmaker Julie Winokur.
The Ironbound district of Newark, New Jersey (home of the Dodge Poetry Festival), is one of the most toxic neighborhoods in the country. Maria Lopez-Nuñez, a Honduran-American resident there, is waging a war for environmental justice. She is part of the Ironbound Community Corporation, one of the most effective environmental justice organizations in the country. The Sacrifice Zone is a 35-minute documentary that follows Maria as she leads a group of environmental justice fighters determined to break the cycle of poor communities of color serving as dumping grounds for our consumer society.
MARINA CARREIRA (she/her/hers) is a queer Luso-American poet artist from Newark, NJ. She is the author of tantotanto (Cavankerry Press, forthcoming 2022), Save the Bathwater (Get Fresh Books, 2018) and I Sing to That Bird Knowing It Won’t Sing Back (Finishing Line Press, 2017). She has exhibited her art at Morris Museum, ArtFront Galleries, West Orange Arts Council, Monmouth University Center for the Arts, among others. Her work investigates identity as it relates to gender, urban, queer, and bicultural first-generation spaces. Keep up with her at hellomarinacarreira.com.
CAMILLE T. DUNGY is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Trophic Cascade (Wesleyan UP, 2017), winner of the Colorado Book Award, and the essay collection Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood and History (W.W. Norton, 2017), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Dungy has also edited anthologies including Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry and From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great. A 2019 Guggenheim Fellow, her honors include NEA Fellowships in poetry (2003) and prose (2018), an American Book Award, two NAACP Image Award nominations, and two Hurston/Wright Legacy Award nominations. Dungy’s poems have been published in Best American Poetry, The 100 Best African American Poems, the Pushcart Anthology, Best American Travel Writing, and over thirty other anthologies. She is University Distinguished Professor at Colorado State University.
MARIA LOPEZ-NUÑEZ works for the Ironbound Community Corporation. She is an environmental justice organizer and plays a large role in activating and uplifting her community while also pushing for policies to address environmental injustice locally, regionally, and nationally. She is on the board of the Climate Justice Alliance and serves on the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council.
A life-long learner and advocate, DR. JALONNE WHITE-NEWSOME founded Empowering a Green Environment and Economy, LLC, a strategic consulting firm, with the mission of transforming communities through the development of people-centered solutions. She serves a diverse set of clients with forward-thinking and intersectional approaches to tackle issues such as climate change, public health, environmental injustice, and advancing racial equity. Jalonne has multi-sector experience having worked in environmental philanthropy, state government, non-profit, grassroots, academia and private industry. Most notably, she created and implemented the transformational Climate Resilient and Equitable Water Systems (CREWS) Initiative at the Kresge Foundation as a Senior Program Officer; she was the first Director of WE ACT for Environmental Justice’s federal policy office in Washington, DC; and, her doctoral research illuminated the impact of climate change & extreme heat on the low-income, elderly in Detroit, and is still referenced to drive public health interventions. She is a Lecturer at The George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health, a lifetime member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc., and the proud mom of Arielle and Jeannelyn.
JULIE WINOKUR is the Director of The Sacrifice Zone and Executive Director of Talking Eyes Media, a nonprofit company that produces compelling media that advocates for positive social change. The Sacrifice Zone emerged from a multimedia storytelling project called Newest Americans that for the past six years has been examining immigration and identity in Newark, N.J. Winokur’s work has been featured in The New York Times, Time, National Geographic and The Atlantic.