Pittsburgh Launch! Christopher Kondrich "Tread Upon" with Diana Khoi Nguyen

We are grateful to host Christopher Kondrich in celebration of his third book of poetry, Tread Upon! Imaginative, visionary, and intensely lyric, Tread Upon challenges our anthropocentric culture and questions notions of individual responsibility amid corporate misinformation. Christopher will be joined in conversation by local poet, multimedia artist, and educator, Diana Khoi Nguyen.

Tread Upon—by turns tender and furious, and wholly original—attempts to depict the various scales upon which climate change unfolds around us.

Bold, incisive, and wholly original, Christopher Kondrich's Tread Upon explores the social, political, religious, and economic drivers behind the chronic devaluation of the living world. In this book-length sequence, in which each section unravels a word or phrase of the prefatory poem, Tread Upon sprawls from suburbia to the Southern Ocean, from the Cape Fear River to the phones in our hands. Kondrich juxtaposes the intimate with the epic, integrating climate research and reporting to dismantle narratives of anthropocentrism and our individual responsibility amid corporate misinformation. What is the price of our (in)actions and who must pay the cost? In this world where “even one blade is a place," the sequence reveals that the violence done to the living world is violence done to ourselves.

DIANA KHOI NGUYEN is the author of Root Fractures and Ghost Of, a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and her video work has been exhibited at Miller ICA. A Kundiman and MacDowell fellow, Nguyen teaches creative writing in the MFA programs at Randolph College and the University of Pittsburgh.

CHRISTOPHER KONDRICH is the author of Contrapuntal and Valuing, which won the National Poetry Series and was named a best book of 2019 by Library Journal. His poems have appeared widely in such venues as The Atlantic, The Believer, The Kenyon Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, New England Review, The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry London, and The Yale Review, and he has received fellowships from MacDowell, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts,and Yaddo. He is also the coeditor of Creature Needs: Writers Respond the Science of Animal Conservation and an associate editor for 32 Poems. He is currently Visiting Poet in Residence for the Creative Writing MFA program at the University of Maryland.