Join us for a celebration of perennial foods and their deep roots! We'll gather at Newton Public Library to enjoy perennial treats, a prairie poetry reading, and conversation with writers Jesse Nathan and Aubrey Streit Krug about the new book Living Roots: The Promise of Perennial Foods. Visual artist and Bethel College professor Rachel Epp Buller will moderate the conversation.

Living Roots: The Promise of Perennial Foods incorporates perspectives from experts across numerous backgrounds and lived experiences to examine the promise of perennial foods such as perennial grains, Indigenous food forests, fruit trees, nuts, berries, and more for sustaining communities and protecting the health of our shared planet. Faith & Life Bookstore will be on hand to sell copies of the book, as well as Nathan's debut poetry collection, Eggtooth.

This is a hybrid program: Attend in person at Newton Public Library, 223 E. 7th, or click here to sign up for the Zoom Webinar simulcast.

About Our Guests:

Aubrey Streit Krug is a writer and researcher who investigates relationships among humans, plants, and places. She is the Director of the Perennial Cultures Lab at The Land Institute, where her team leads social and cultural research and educational efforts like civic science that feature learning with communities to help realize more just, diverse, and perennial grain agricultures. Her most recent project, co-edited with Liz Carlisle, is the essay collection Living Roots: The Promise of Perennial Foods. Aubrey grew up in rural Kansas, and her curiosity about grassland stories and plants led her to earn a PhD in English and Great Plains Studies. She loves rocky prairie hillsides and lives in Kansas.

Jesse Nathan's debut collection of poems, Eggtooth, won the Kansas Book Award and the New Writers Award. His poems appear in the Paris Review, the New Republic, the New Territory, and the I-70 Review. He was a Robert Frost Fellow in Poetry at Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in Vermont. Nathan grew up in northern California, and on a wheat farm in McPherson County. He's a graduate of Bethel College, and he teaches literature in the English Department at UC Berkeley.

Rachel Epp Buller (MFA, PhD) is a visual and sound artist, feminist art historian, educator, and mother of three. She has exhibited her artwork in solo and group exhibitions in the US, UK, Canada, the Netherlands, Germany, and Italy. She is a two-time Fulbright Scholar, board member of the national Women’s Caucus for Art, certified practitioner in Deep Listening, and Professor of Visual Arts and Design at Bethel College.