Leaning Toward Light

The Oak Spring Garden Foundation is an operating foundation dedicated to sharing the gifts and ideas of Rachel "Bunny" Mellon.  Its mission is to support and inspire fresh thinking and bold action on the history and future of plants, including the art and culture of plants, gardens and landscapes.

Oak Spring Garden Foundation

Please join us for a conversation between Tess Taylor and Ross Gay to celebrate the release of Leaning Toward Light.

Busboys and Poets  | Langston Hughes Room

Overview: The Oak Spring Garden Foundation hopes you will join us at Busboys and Poets to celebrate the release of Leaning Toward Light, a new anthology of poems edited by Tess Taylor. The evening will include readings from Tess Taylor and Ross Gay, as well as a brief moderated conversation and time for questions led by L. Renée. Following the reading and conversation, Tess and Ross will be avaible for book signings.Leaning Toward Light includes works by contemporary poets including Ross Gay, Jericho Brown, Mark Doty, Jane Hirshfield, Ada Limón, Danusha Laméris, Naomi Shihab Nye, Garrett Hongo, Ellen Bass, and James Crews, as well as rising stars. The book celebrates gardens and gardeners, and the communtities small and large that thrive becuase of them.Copies of Leaning Toward Light will be available for purchase at the event, and tickets include 1 drink ticket.About Oak Spring Garden Foundation: The Oak Spring Garden Foundation (OSGF) is a philanthropic foundation based at the former primary estate of the late Paul and Rachel Mellon, who were major philanthropists in the U.S. of the arts, humanities, and sciences in the second half of the twentieth century. OSGF is located in the northern Virginia Piedmont and Blue Ridge Mountains region (ca. one-hour drive from Washington, D.C.). Led by Sir Peter Crane, the Foundation’s inaugural President, OSGF provides workshops, short courses and supports residencies for artists and scholars. Its celebrated Library comprises rare books, manuscripts and works of art relating to horticulture, landscape design, botany and natural history. It is becoming a new center of stimulation of all things botanical, from fundamental research in plant evolution and conservation, to horticultural and plant conservation practice, to the history and art of plants, gardens and landscapes.Photo Release StatementBy attending this event, you consent to your likeness and image being used for ongoing promotional and marketing efforts.

<a href="https://www.tess-taylor.com/" title="https://www.tess-taylor.com/" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Tess Taylor’s</a>  body of work deals with place, ecology, memory and cultural reckoning.  She published five celebrated poetry collections: The Misremembered World, The Forage House,  Last West: Roadsongs for Dorothea Lange, Work &amp; Days, and Rift Zone.  She has also served as the on-air poetry reviewer for NPR’s All Things Considered for over a decade. Her work as a cultural critic appears in in Harpers Magazine, The Atlantic, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, Tin House, The Times Literary Supplement, CNN, and The New York Times.  She is currently at work on two plays, one  of which is a stage adaptation of her book of poems about  American photographer Dorothea Lange.  This fall, she’ll publish her first full length poetry anthology:  Leaning Toward Light: Poems for Gardens and the Hands that Tend Them, a collection of contemporary gardening poems, for an era of climate crisis. She lives just outside Berkeley California.

<a href="https://www.rossgay.net/" title="https://www.rossgay.net/" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Ross Gay</a> is the author of four books of poetry: Against Which; Bringing the Shovel Down; Be Holding, winner of the PEN American Literary Jean Stein Award; and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. In addition to his poetry, Ross has released three collections of essays—The Book of Delights was released in 2019 and was a New York Times bestseller; Inciting Joy was released in 2022, and his newest collection, The Book of (More) Delights was released in September of 2023.

<a href="https://lreneepoems.com/" title="https://lreneepoems.com/" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">L. Renée</a> is a poet and nonfiction writer living in Harrisonburg, Virginia. Nominated for Best New Poets, Best of the Net and two Pushcart Prizes, her work has been published in Obsidian, Tin House Online, Poetry Northwest, the minnesota review, and elsewhere. The granddaughter of proud Black Appalachians, she won the international 2022 Rattle Poetry Prize and Appalachian Review’s Denny C. Plattner Award, among others. A recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem Foundation and the Watering Hole, L. Renée also holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Indiana University, where she was Nonfiction Editor of the Indiana Review, and an MS in Journalism from Columbia University, where she was a Joseph Pulitzer II and Edith Moore Fellow. She believes in Black joy, her ancestors, wondering, and wandering.

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Leaning Toward Light

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