Alexis Lathem
Photo by Gioia Kuss
Bio
Alexis Lathem is the author of the poetry collection Alphabet of Bones (Wind Ridge Books) and two chapbooks. Her poems and essays have appeared in About Place Journal, AWP’s Writer’s Chronicle, Beloit Poetry Journal, Chelsea Review, Gettysburg Review, the Hopper, Hunger Mountain, Saranac Review, Solstice, Spoon River, Tikkun, West Branch, and other journals. She teaches writing at a community college and has worked for many years as an advocacy journalist and communications professional for environmental, food justice, and First Nations solidarity movements. An emeritus Black Earth Institute fellow, she is a recipient of the Chelsea Award for Poetry, a Bread Loaf scholarship, a Vermont Arts Council grant, four Pushcart Prize nominations, and the Publisher’s Award from Canada’s Alternatives Journal. She received an MFA in writing from Vermont College, and lives on a small farm in Vermont, ancestral lands of the Abenaki.
My friend the late Grace Paley used to advise young writers to “keep a low overhead” so that they would have room in their lives for creative work. This I have mostly done, though such a precarious life has not been easy. I teach part-time at a community college to a diverse student body, many of them first-generation college students, among them new Americans, many of them brilliant, almost all of them heroic in their efforts to meet the demands of school, family, and full-time work. I have for many years spent more of my hours shepherding the writing of others, and now this gift of time will allow me to attend to my own.
For most of my adult life, I’ve been engaged in social and environmental justice movements, which is how I came to be a writer. I write in order to bear witness— to the beauty of the world under assault, to wild places that future generations may never have to chance to know, and to resistance movements to defend those places. Even when those movements do not succeed, resistance itself is meaningful.
Our work in the environmental justice movement is necessary but can be exhausting and spiritually crushing—especially because most often we lose. But we keep going. As artists we keep putting pen to paper, and we hope that our work will widen the circles of empathy and will have meaning to others. This validation from the National Endowment for the Arts has come at a time when it’s so badly needed. I am so immensely grateful for this gift of freedom, at last, to live for a time as first and foremost, a writer, and for the encouragement to keep going.