Nature is What We Come To in the Practice of Remembering

This conversation opens a space to celebrate the rich perspectives of Black artists, social change makers, and everyday folks who’ve deepened our capacities to feel, observe, and be present to natural worlds that are often weaponized against us as Black people shaped in various ways by the U.S. South (east/west).

Coming from a range of disciplines and movements—music, poetry, oral history, birding, land stewardship, water protection, sobriety, demilitarization, and more—guests Lazarus Letcher, Erica Vital-Lazare, Claytee D. White, and host Saretta Morgan will reflect on their personal eco-histories and share literature, songs, photos, and ephemera that speak to how they’ve come to understand their sense of place and possibility in ever-shifting and contested geographies.

This event is co-presented with The Library District.

Saretta Morgan is the author of Alt-Nature (Coffee House Press, 2024), and the chapbooks Feeling Upon Arrival (Ugly Duckling, 2018), and room for a counter interior (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2017).

Her work engages ecologies and forms of connectivity that develop alongside processes of U.S. militarization. Over the past decade she has participated in veteran-led organizing with Veterans for Peace (NYC) and About Face: Veterans Against the War, as well as the humanitarian aid work of No More Deaths Phoenix, which provides direct support to address the death and suffering of migrants in the Sonoran Desert. Additionally, she has been fortunate to participate in, and learn from, Indigenous-led water protection and food sovereignty work, Black-led community healing initiatives, and trans-led support for detained migrants. She believes in a Free Palestine as part of the broader inevitability of LAND BACK for Indigenous peoples across the earth.

Born in Appalachia and raised on military installations, she is a daughter of the South (east & west). She lives on Muscogee lands in Atlanta, GA where she trains in Capoeira and wild bird rehabilitation.

Lazarus Letcher (they/them) is a Ph.D. candidate in American Studies at the University of New Mexico, focusing on linking homophobia and transphobia to white supremacy culture and examining art as resistance. Letcher has written for Autostraddle, them, El Palacio, and the occasional dry academic journal or rad zine. They’ve taught courses like Southwest Studies, Race and Ethnic Studies, and Peace and Justice Studies.

Letcher plays viola in the environmental justice folk band Eileen & the In-Betweens and for art installations/durational performances with the group Stages of Tectonic Blackness. With the support of a National Performance Network Grant, Stages of Tectonic Blackness set out to the New Mexico desert to create a film, Blackdom, performing on and connecting with the land of an abandoned all-Black ghost town. While working on Blackdom, the group connected with descendants of this former utopian experiment and shared their stories in an exhibit at New Mexico State University. Stages of Tectonic Blackness' work has been shown at the NMSU Art Museum, Armory Center for the Arts, the National Hispanic Cultural Center, and other museums across the U.S.

In addition to this work, Letcher is a trainer for Sins Invalid, a performance-based disability justice organization. After surviving a M**der attempt involving an assault weapon in 2023, Letcher has used their voice to push for gun safety and to support other survivors of gun violence.

Erica Vital-Lazare is a Southern-born writer living in Las Vegas where she teaches Creative Writing and Marginalized Voices in Dystopian Literature at the College of Southern Nevada. She is cofounder of The Obodo Collective, a nonprofit dedicated to combatting multigenerational poverty, and founder of Our Mothers' Gardens Book Festival at Obodo Urban Farm, now in its third year. She is co-producer of the photo-narrative exhibition, Obsidian & Neon:Building Black Life in Las Vegas and editor of the literary series, Of the Diaspora with McSweeney’s Press.

Claytee D. White is the inaugural director of the Oral History Research Center for the University of Nevada, Las Vegas Libraries. She collects the history of Las Vegas and the surrounding area by gathering memories of events and experiences from longtime residents. Her projects include early health care in the city, history of the John S. Park Neighborhood, The Boyer Early Las Vegas Oral History Project, and a study of musicians who played with some of the greats in the entertainment field. White currently serves on the Board of Women of Diversity, the UNLV Presidential Debate Planning Committee, and the Historic Preservation Commission. White has also served on the Historic Preservation Commission for the city of Las Vegas, Nevada Humanities executive board, and is the past president of the Southwest Oral History Association.

Parking/getting there: The New West Las Vegas Library is located at 1861 N. Martin Luther King Blvd. Las Vegas, NV 89106. Free parking is available on-site.

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Host or Publisher Black Mountain Institute