Creature Needs: It’s A Beautiful Day in this Neighborhood

All living creatures share the same six basic needs: air, water, food, shelter, room to move, and each other. This event is for people interested in pondering what it means to share these needs with nonhhuman creatures - on our streets, in our backyards, our parks, shorelines, and skies. We hope to inspire readers, writers, artists, scientists, and animal lovers with an evening of science, art, and literature informed by science and emotionally charged. 

Through a combination of science presentation, craft discussion, an informal creative exercise or two, and group conversation, participants will have the opportunity to weave the science of urban wildlife into their understanding of the creatures around us and to try their hand at creative writing and art that incorporates the science. Taught by writer Susan Tacent and scientist Dr. Lucy Spelman. Open to animal lovers and the animal-curious as well as scientists, writers and visual artists from beginners to advanced.

Copies of the book Creature Needs: Writers Respond to the Science of Animal Conservation will be available for purchase by Ink Fish Books

Registration recommended as seating is limited. See form below.

LUCY SPELMAN  is founder of Creature Conserve, a nonprofit dedicated to combining art with science to cultivate new pathways for wildlife conservation. A zoological medicine veterinarian, she teaches biology at the Rhode Island School of Design and is author of National Geographic Kids Animal Encyclopedia and coeditor of The Rhino with Glue-On Shoes.

SUSAN TACENT is a writer, scholar, and educator from Brooklyn, New York. Her fiction has appeared in journals including Blackbird, DIAGRAM, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Tin House Online, Coolest American Stories 2022, Slice Magazine; her criticism, interviews, and scholarly writing have appeared in The Common, Dostoevsky Studies, The Keats-Shelley Journal, and others. She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Brown University and has taught literature and creative writing at Oberlin College, Roger Williams University, LitArts RI, Rogers Free Library where she facilitates the the wonderful adult book club. She is co-editor of Creature Needs: Writers Respond to the Science of Animal Conservation, University of Minnesota Press.