Chris Martin & Adam Wolfond

A conversation and poetry reading
Chris Martin Adam Wolfond Multiverse Series Milkweed Editions Point Reyes Books
Tuesday, February 7, 2023 - 6:00pm
Zoom

Tickets: 

Free, registration required

Poet and educator Chris Martin and poet Adam Wolfond join us via Zoom for a conversation and poetry reading. 

“Adam Wolfond’s astonishing work maps and annotates the interior spaces in lyric intensity. In poems that glide, posit, and sing, we hear how the body, attuned to ‘the trees . . . languaging,’ constructs art. It is here where we are taught to understand multiple knowledges and registers in the choir of what’s possible. These are extraordinary poems.”— Oliver de la Paz

This is free event will be streamed on Zoom.

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About Chris Martin's May Tomorrow Be Awake

An author and educator’s pioneering approach to helping autistic students find their voices through poetry—a powerful and uplifting story that shows us how to better communicate with people on the spectrum and explores how we use language to express our seemingly limitless interior lives.

Adults often find it difficult to communicate with autistic students and try to “fix” them. But what if we found a way to help these kids use their natural gifts to convey their thoughts and feelings? What if the traditional structure of language prevents them from communicating the full depth of their experiences? What if the most effective and most immediate way for people on the spectrum to express themselves is through verse, which mirrors their sensory-rich experiences and patterned thoughts?

May Tomorrow Be Awake explores these questions and opens our eyes to a world of possibility. It is the inspiring story of one educator’s journey to understand and communicate with his students—and the profound lessons he learned. Chris Martin, an award-winning poet and celebrated educator, works with non-verbal children and adults on the spectrum, teaching them to write poetry. The results have been nothing short of staggering for both these students and their teacher. Through his student’s breathtaking poems, Martin discovered what it means to be fully human.

Martin introduces the techniques he uses in the classroom and celebrates an inspiring group of young autistic thinkers—Mark, Christophe, Zach, and Wallace—and their electric verse, which is as artistically dazzling as it is stereotype-shattering. In telling each of their stories, Martin illuminates the diverse range of autism and illustrates how each so-called “deficit” can be transformed into an asset when writing poems. Meeting these remarkable students offers new insight into disability advocacy and reaffirms the depth of our shared humanity. 

Martin is a teacher and a lifelong learner, May Tomorrow Be Awake is written from a desire to teach and to learn—about the mind, about language, about human potential—and the lessons we have to share with one other. 

About Adam Wolfond's The Wanting Way

In The Wanting Way, the second book in Multiverse--a literary series written and curated by the neurodivergent--Adam Wolfond proves more than willing to "extend the choreography."

In fact, his entire thrust is out and toward. Each poem moves out along its own underutilized pathway, awakening unseen dimensions for the reader like a wooded night walk suddenly lit by fireflies. And as each path elaborates itself, Wolfond's guiding hand seems always to stay held out to the reader, inviting them further into a shared and unprecedented unfolding. The Wanting Way is actually a confluence of diverse ways--rallies, paths, waves, jams, streams, desire lines--that converge wherever the dry verbiage of the talking world requires hydration. Each poem is an invitation to bathe in the play of languaging. And each poem is an invitation to a dance that's already happening, called into motion by the objects and atmospheres of a more-than-human world. Wolfond makes space for new poetics, new choreographies, and new possibilities toward forging a consensual--felt and feeling--world where we might find free disassembly and assembly together. There is a neurodivergent universe within this one, and Wolfond's poems continuously pull back the unnecessary veil between human and nature.

About the Participants

Adam Wolfond is the author of The Wanting Way. He is a nonspeaking autistic artist, poet, and university lecturer whose work has been featured in multimedia exhibitions, documentary films, academic journals, and philosophical treatises. He is the youngest writer to appear in the Academy of American Poets’ “Poem-A-Day” series and is the author of two chapbooks, There Is Too Music in My Ears and In Way of Music Water Answers Toward Questions Other Than What Is Autism, both published by Unrestricted Editions. He is also a founding member of dis assembly, a neurodiverse artist collective based in Toronto. 

Chris Martin is this very moment endeavoring to become himself, a somemany and tilted thinking animal who sways, hags, loves, trees, lights, listens, and arrives. He is a poet who teaches and learns in mutual measure, as the connective hub of Unrestricted Interest/TILT and the curator of Multiverse, a series of neurodivergent writing from Milkweed Editions. His most recent book of poems is Things to Do in Hell (Coffee House, 2020) and he lives on the edge of Bde Maka Ska in Minneapolis, among the bur oaks and mulberries, with Mary Austin Speaker and their two bewildering creatures. 

May Tomorrow Be Awake: On Poetry, Autism, and Our Neurodiverse Future By Chris Martin Cover Image
$26.99
ISBN: 9780063020153
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: HarperOne - August 9th, 2022

The Wanting Way: Poems (Multiverse) By Adam Wolfond Cover Image
$16.00
ISBN: 9781571315502
Availability: Not On Our Shelves Now (Usually Ships in 1-5 Days)
Published: Milkweed Editions - November 8th, 2022