Winged Wonderment 2023 Program Schedule coming soon!
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Poet/lawyer/classical guitarist/mycologist Steven Rood reads his poems with birds as psychic
and objective realities: inner and outer worlds meeting in living beings with feathers. His most
recent book is Naming the Wind (Omnidawn, 2022).
Steven Rood was born in Los Angeles, attended Hollywood High School and U.C. Berkeley, and
is a practicing trial lawyer. He has studied classical guitar for decades. For 15 years he
was a friend and poetry student of Jack Gilbert, until Jack’s death. Steven Rood’s book,
Naming the Wind, was published in 2022 by Omnidawn Press, and a second book, Music
From the Next Room, will be published by Omnidawn in 2024. An earlier iteration of
Naming the Wind was a 2019 National Poetry Series Finalist. His poems appear in
Periodicities, Sporklet, Quarterly West, Marin Poetry Center Anthology, Fugue, Lyric,
Hayden’s Ferry Review, Tar River Poetry, New Letters, The Marlboro Review, The
Atlanta Review, The Southern Poetry Review, Notre Dame Review, and elsewhere. He
lives in Berkeley.
California Indian Artist Meyo Marrufo (Eastern Pomo from Clear Lake, tribally from Robinson
Rancheria) will show images and share her process of creating her remarkable digital
color paintings of traditional California Indian baskets paired with native California birds—giving
insights on how the baskets themselves inform her creations.
Meyo Marrufo is Eastern Pomo artist from the Clear Lake basin, and her tribe is Robinson
Rancheria Band of Pomo Indians. Meyo began working for her tribe as a cultural resource
assistant in the environmental department. She also teaches classes on the continuation of
tribal knowledge and renewing it for future generations in Northern California. Meyo connects
her digital artwork (as she calls finger-doodles), to the traditional Pomo life, customary dance
and basket patterns. With the cultural nature of Pomo basket designs, Meyo weaves the
‘basket language’ of meanings and uses into her drawings and beadwork.
Bay Nature Magazine associate editor Lia Keener will describe BirdCast, a free bird migration
app that employs real-time analysis of bird migration traffic as detected by radar. Learn what
birds are migrating in your area each night, where they are headed, and what birds are on their
way to your neighborhood.
Lia Keener grew up in Bend, Oregon and graduated from UC Berkeley in May with a major in
environmental biology and minors in journalism and Chinese language. She now works at Bay
Nature Magazine as assistant editor. In her free time, Lia loves making art and searching for
organisms of all kinds (especially birds!) in the Bay Area, Bend, and Portland
Naturalist, artist, and educator John Muir Laws offers tips and techniques for drawing birds, as
well as ways to incorporate illustration and scientific note-taking as a means to greater
observation, memory, and curiosity.
John (Jack) Muir Laws is a principal leader and innovator of the worldwide nature journaling
movement. Jack is a scientist, educator, and author, who helps people forge a deeper and more
personal connection with nature through keeping illustrated nature journals and understanding
science. His work intersects science, art, and mindfulness. Trained as a wildlife biologist and an
associate of the California Academy of Sciences, he observes the world with rigorous attention.
He looks for mysteries, plays with ideas, and seeks connections in all he sees. Attention,
observation, curiosity, and creative thinking are not gifts, but skills that grow with training and
deliberate practice. As an educator and author, Jack teaches techniques and supports routines
that develop these skills to make them a part of everyday life.
Jeffrey Peterson discusses the ways his lifelong love of field guides and the unpaged world of
nature animate his current work as an educator, bird photographer, and member of the Point
Molate Alliance. Dedicated to the project of making Point Molate visible, Peterson hopes his
photographs will not only help raise awareness of this little-known gem on the Richmond
shoreline (the last undeveloped headland on San Francisco Bay), but also contribute to its
protection in perpetuity as park space.
A longtime Richmond resident, Jeffrey Peterson teaches at The College Preparatory School in
Oakland, where he offers courses on the literature of birds, rivers, and seas that draw on his
passion for language and the natural world.
Kay Charter, founder & director of Saving Birds Thru Habitat, will give a dynamic and engaging
presentation on strategies for saving and enjoying wild birds. In her talk, “Bringing Nature
Home to California,” she will share six things you can do in your backyard to help reverse the
dramatic decline of songbird populations.
Kay Charter and her husband Jim founded Saving Birds Thru Habitat in 2001 to help stem the
decline of the migratory songbird population by teaching people of all ages how to protect,
enhance, and restore habitat for North American birds.
Tiana Williams-Claussen, director of the Yurok Tribe Wildlife Department, will speak to the 14-
year journey to bring California condor home to Yurok country and the Pacific Northwest,
including the traditional paradigm guiding the Yurok Tribe’s efforts, their management
approach for reintegrating the species to the region, and an update on the newly released flock.
Tiana Williams-Claussen is a member of the Yurok Nation, from the village of Wehl-kwew’, and
Director of the Yurok Tribe Wildlife Department. She received her Bachelors’ degree in
Biochemical Sciences from Harvard University and was instrumental in the creation of the Yurok
Tribe Wildlife Program and the development of many of its conservation initiatives, including
the effort to reintroduce California condors to Yurok Ancestral Territory. Tiana relies on her
native upbringing and formal education to bridge the beliefs, knowledge, and practices of the
Yurok with those rooted in Western-science, and to work toward a cohesive, well-informed
perspective on holistic ecosystem management.
River of Words youth poets Avah Dodson, Diane Wu, and Macie Wu will read their bird-inspired
winning poems from the annual River of Words Contest, the world’s largest youth poetry
competition, based at The Center for Environmental Literacy at Saint Mary’s College of
California in Moraga. Center for Environmental Literacy Fellow, Sarah Ray, will also read one of
her poems.
River of Words is a program of The Center for Environmental Literacy and a part of the
Kalmanovitz School of Education at Saint Mary’s College of California in Moraga.
Acknowledged pioneers in the field of place-based education, River of Words has been
inspiring educators and their students for almost thirty years with an innovative blend of
science and the arts. River of Words was founded by Winged Wonderment producer
Pamela Michael and then-US Poet Laureate Robert Hass. ROW poets Avah Dodson, Diane
Wu, and Macie Wu will read their winning poems from the annual River of Words Contest,
the world’s largest youth poetry competition. Also reading will be Center for
Environmental Literacy Fellow, Sarah Ray.
With a glance at Berkeley’s first birder poet Charles Keeler and his pioneering Bird Notes
Afield, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and UC professor Robert Hass will look at the way birds have
gotten the attention of poets, what they’ve seen and what they’ve projected there.
Robert Hass was born in San Francisco and attended St. Mary’s College and Stanford University.
His books of poetry include Time and Materials, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize in 2007
and the National Book Award in 2008; Sun Under Wood, for which he received the National
Book Critics Circle Award in 1996; Human Wishes; Praise, for which he received the William
Carlos Williams Award in 1979; and Field Guide, which was selected by Stanley Kunitz for the
Yale Younger Poets Series. In 1984, he was named a MacArthur Genius Fellow. Hass also
worked with Czeslaw Milosz to translate a dozen volumes of Milosz’s poetry. His translations of
the Japanese haiku masters have been collected in The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa. His books of essays include Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry,
which received the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism in 1984, and Now and Then:
The Poet’s Choice Columns, 1997-2000. From 1995 to 1997 he served as poet laureate of the
United States. While serving his two terms in that post he co-founded (with writer/activist and
Winged Wonderment producer, Pamela Michael) the international youth environmental and
arts education program, River of Words.
Wildlife photographer Vishal Subramanyan will discuss how rodenticides work their way
through a food chain, how wildlife is affected by rodenticides, and will offer environmentally
friendly alternatives to rodenticide use.
Vishal Subramanyan is a UC Berkeley student, wildlife photographer, and Raptors Are The
Solution (RATS) volunteer. He is passionate about community based conservation, and has
spent the last three years using photography, social media, and public speaking to
communicate to the public about the detrimental impacts of rodenticides on wildlife.
Cal Falcons scientists give you an inside look at the dramatic events of the last year at the
Campanile and celebrate one of the great wildlife success stories – the return of the Peregrine
Falcon from the brink of extinction.
Sean Peterson is a Assistant Professor of Evolution at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota.
He received his Masters’ Degree from the University of Minnesota and his PhD from the
University of California Berkeley. He has been working with birds since 2007.
Lynn Schofield is a staff biologist at the Institute for Bird Populations, where she has been
studying birds since 2006. She earned her Masters’ Degree at Eastern Illinois University
studying migration patterns across the Gulf of Mexico.
Sean and Lynn have been members of Cal Falcons since Annie and Grinnell first moved into the
Campanile.
Experimental composer/artist/performer Guillermo Galindo will create a “flying soundscape,”
using bird calls and electronics. The Mexican-born composer’s work examines the intersection
of art disciplines, politics, humanitarian issues, spirituality, and social awareness.
Guillermo Galindo is a Mexican-born composer, sonic architect, performance artist and visual
media artist. His acoustic work includes two commissioned orchestral compositions for the
OFUNAM (Mexico University Orchestra) and the Oakland Symphony Orchestra and Choir, solo
instrumental works, two operas, sonic sculptures, visual arts, computer interaction works,
electro-acoustic music, film, instrument building, three-dimensional immersive installations and
live improvisation. He teaches at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco.