PUTNEY-Join Youth Poet Laureate of Vermont Emma Paris for a reading at Putney Public Library, 55 Main St., on Tuesday, Aug. 19, at 7 p.m.
Paris is a Putney resident and a student at Bennington College, studying poetry and ecology with a focus on environmental data interpretation for creative work. Her writing centers the interwoven web of trophic cascades (both natural and fabricated) that shape our interactions with each other and the individual and collective return to innate wilderness.
She will be reading work written in her first year at Bennington College that has evolved from research and data she has studied and interpreted using experimental formulas to transcribe into her poetry. These data, primarily derived from wolf restoration research, have determined line, syllable, and word count in her work, in order to embed the data in the form itself, not simply stopping at content.
In addition to her scientific poetry, Emma will also be sharing work from her upcoming poetry debut, The Animal Wife.
Through her work as a poet and student ecologist, Paris experiments with the undulating intersection of creative writing and science while creating poetry that is both inherently and intentionally political. Satisfying the urge of creative instinct is a methodology of personal justice, she says; "sharing and creating the work with others is where collective justice begins."
Paris's writing has appeared in VTDigger, the Viewless Wings Poetry Podcast, the Northern New England Review, Harpur Palate, and more. She interned at Green Writers Press during the winter of 2025, helping edit and proofread upcoming titles in poetry. Keep up with her on Instagram at @vt_youth_poet_laureate_2025.
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