Versed in Science (and Math): An Evening of Poetry

Science and technology are leading characters in many of our time’s great ongoing narratives. And so these categories of human endeavor offer rich fodder for the synthetic and analytic, and the metaphoric and analogic, powers of poetry. Join us to hear the work of two accomplished poets, Rick Mullin and JoAnne Growney, and then read your own science-inspired poetry at the open mic. By day, Mullin is an editor with the weekly Chemical & Engineering News. By night, he is a bard, adopting a variety of poetic forms to tell the stories of his cultural heroes. Mullin’s most recent collection, Sonnets from the Voyage of the Beagle, recounts the young Charles Darwin’s trek around the world in Petrarchan sonnets (sonnets with specified rhyme schemes) written as journal entries in Darwin’s voice. Growney, a former professor at Bloomsburg University in Pennsylvania, is a poet and mathematician who often explores where the twain of these pursuits meet in her blog “Intersections–Poetry with Mathematics.” Her poetry collections include Red Has No Reason and My Dance Is Mathematics.