Writing the Environment: Appreciating and Protecting the World Outside

Name: Writing the Environment: Appreciating and Protecting the World Outside
Start: 2026-04-24T18:30:00-05:00
End: 2026-04-24T20:00:00-05:00
Location: Center for Public Secrets

Schedule

Fri Apr 24 2026 at 06:30 pm to 08:00 pm

UTC-05:00

Location

Center for Public Secrets | Tulsa, OK

Join us for a reading about environmental issues, featuring poets Ken Hada, Daniela Naomi Molnar, Jasminé Elizabeth Smith and Tim Tomlinson.
About this Event

None of us exists in a space unaffected by climate change, whether that be the arrival unexpected whether patterns, depreciating air quality, disturbances in animal behavior, or changes in the way crops are grown. Join us for an evening of poetry, where four authors (Ken Hada, Daniela Naomi Molnar, Jasminé Elizabeth Smith, and Tim Tomlinson) will share work that touches on environmental concerns, covering topics such as the death of coral reefs, melting glaciers and ice caps, Oklahoma weather, and more.

Ken Hada

Ken Hada is a poet and professor at East Central University in Ada, Oklahoma where he directs the annual Scissortail Creative Writing Festival. Ken finds the natural order a powerful presence for writing. His work has received the 2022 Oklahoma Book Award, the 2017 SCMLA Poetry Prize, has been featured on The Writer’s Almanac, received the Western Heritage Award, named finalist for the Spur Award and six-time finalist for the Oklahoma Book Awards. In 2017 Ken gratefully accepted the Glenda Carlile Distinguished Service Award from the Oklahoma Center for the Book. His published poetry collections include: Visions for the Night, Come Before Winter, Feral Skies: Selected Poems 2008-2020, Contour Feathers, Sunlight & Cedar, Not Quite Pilgrims, Bring an Extry Mule, Persimmon Sunday, Spare Parts, Margaritas & Redfish, The Way of the Wind and The River White: A Confluence of Brush & Quill. The “Ken Hada Collection” is held at the Western History Collection Library at the University of Oklahoma. Ken enjoys reading his work at venues around the country.

https://kenhada.org/

Daniela Naomi Molnar

Daniela Naomi Molnar is a poet, artist, and writer who creates with color, water, language, and place. Her debut book, CHORUS, won the 2024 Oregon Book Award for Poetry and was selected by Kazim Ali as the winner of Omnidawn Press’s 1st/2nd Book Award. Her paintings are created with pigments she makes from plants, bones, stones, rainwater, and glacial melt. Forthcoming books include Memory of a Larger Mind (Omnidawn, 2028) and Light / Remains (Bored Wolves Press, 2026). Her book-length poem “Memory of a Larger Mind” accompanies photographs by Julian Stettler in The Glacier Is a Being (Sturm & Drang, 2023). Her work is anthologized in the forthcoming second volume of The Ecopoetry Anthology and in Breaking the Glass: A Contemporary Jewish Poetry Anthology from the Laurel Review. Molnar lives in Portland, Oregon and in the high deserts of the North American West.

www.danielamolnar.com / Instagram: @daniela_naomi_molnar

Jasminé Elizabeth Smith

Jasminé Elizabeth Smith is an Oklahoma poet, educator, and facilitator now residing in Seattle, Washington. She is a Cave Canem and Black Earth Institute fellow and a recipient of the 2025 National Endowment of the Arts in Poetry. Her poetic work interrogates the archives of the African Diaspora in various historical contexts and eras and finds the critical linkages between the past and present. Her work has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has been featured in publications such as Poetry, World Literature Today, and This is the Honey: A Contemporary Poetry Anthology of Black Poetry, among others. Her debut collection, South Flight (University of Georgia Press, 2020), was the winner of the Georgia Poetry Prize.

https://www.jasmineelizabethsmith.com/

Tim Tomlinson

Tim Tomlinson was born in Brooklyn, raised on Long Island, where he was educated by jukeboxes and juvenile delinquents.
He is a Professor of Writing at New York University’s Global Liberal Studies Program.

He is a co-founder of New York Writers Workshop, and co-author of its popular text,. He is the author of the chapbook , the poetry collections and Listening to Fish: Meditations from the Wet World, and the collection of short fiction, .

https://www.timtomlinson.org/

Tulsa Lit Fest is presented by the Center for Poets and Writers, Tri City Collectie, and Magic City Books.