Dickinson College’s Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues will host a virtual event exploring fracking in Pennsylvania through a creative lens. “Shale Play: Poems and Photographs from the Fracking Fields,” will take place via a public YouTube livestream on March 25, at 7 p.m.

The program will be presented by poet Julia Spicher Kasdorf and award-winning documentary photographer Steven Rubin.

The pair has explored the small towns, farms and forests of Appalachian Pennsylvania, an area where more than 12,000 natural gas wells have been drilled since 2008, when hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, began in the Commonwealth.

Together, Kasdorf and Rubin have gathered stories of these places, the people who inhabit them and the impact of the natural gas industry.

Kasdorf is a professor of English at Penn State University and the author of four books of poetry and a collection of essays.

She is the winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, the Great Lakes College’s Association Award for New Writing, a Pushcart Prize and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry. Rubin is a professor of art at Penn State.

His work addresses contemporary issues such as rural poverty, refugee migration, immigrant detention and the social and environmental impacts of energy development.

The program is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and co-sponsored by the departments of English, environmental studies, art & art history and film & media studies.

For additional information or inquiries, please visit Dickinson College Clark Forum webpage or send email to clarkeforum@dickinson.edu.  

(Photo: Steven Rubin photo.)

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[Posted: March 12, 2021]

3/15/2021