Knowledge Share Description

This knowledge share explores how poetry, walking, and attention to place can help us understand our relationships to land, climate, and each other. Using MaKshya Tolbert’s Shade is a place as a starting point, the workshop looks at shade—especially tree shade—as a site of rest, care, memory, and Black sense of place.

Participants will engage with the project’s practices (such as shade walks and shade studies) to reflect on how environments shape interior life, how climate and social conditions are felt in the body, and how slowing down can be a form of care and resistance. The workshop centers conversation and reflection rather than production, inviting participants to think about where they live and move, how they relate to their surroundings, and what it means to “begin again” in changing ecological and social conditions.

Shade is a place is a poetry project by MaKshya Tolbert that meanders east–west along Charlottesville’s Downtown Mall, seeking what Katherine McKittrick names “a Black sense of place.” The work moves at the pace of stressed shade and street trees, the mall’s architectural histories, and the speaker’s ongoing questions and reflections. Walking becomes a method of attention; shade becomes both condition and practice.

Approached as an ecopoetic and social practice, Shade is a place unfolds through a morphology of interrelated forms—shade studies, mutual shade projects, and shade walks—each shaped by and embedded within the changing environment of the Downtown Mall: its trees, people, infrastructures, and traces. The poems and practices are not separate from place but are in constant dialogue with it, responding to ecological precarity, historical layering, and everyday encounter.

These threads bring together ecosocial attention and Black interiority amid shifting climate and unsteady atmospheric ground—conditions that move across and collapse the scales of interior life, communal experience, and state-sanctioned realities. Within this instability, the project searches for a site to “begin again…to find out again where I am and what I must do. A place where I can stop and do nothing in order to start again” (Baldwin).

At the pace of shade—and at each participant’s own pace—the knowledge share centers conversation, contemplation, and reflection on our ever-in-flux relationships to ourselves, each other, and the environments we inhabit. From where we live, stand, steward, and practice, we will discuss and experiment with how ecological poetics and place-based creative processes can offer embodied and poetic responses to Saidiya Hartman’s enduring question in Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: “How will I live?”

Date: Sunday May 31, 2026
Time: 3:00pm – 5:00PM EST
Cost: FREE for Living Library hbc members | Sliding Scale $45, $65, $90 for Non-members

We will explore:

• Recognize Shade is a place as a meshwork of ecological inquiry, creative inquiry, and self-inquiry

• Understand shade equity, arboreal stewardship, Black feminist study, and ecopoetics as instruments for placekeeping, place-based stewardship, and social practice

• Explore how shade, trees, and everyday environments can be sites of care, memory, and Black sense of place

• Reflect on the relationship between interior life, community, and broader ecological and social conditions

• Practice recognizing and reweaving one’s personal language and inner life into a deeper, rhizomatic relationship with one’s environment

• Engage in practice itself—experiencing, experimenting, and embodying place-based and ecopoetic attention

Who this Knowledge Share is For

• Artists, writers, poets, and cultural workers

• Educators, students, and researchers interested in ecopoetics, Black geographies, or place-based practice

• People engaged in ecological, land-based, or community-centered work

• Anyone curious about how walking, attention, and reflection can be creative and relational practices

• Those interested in slowing down, resting, and thinking collectively in a changing climate

• Participants from any background—no prior knowledge of poetry or theory required

Cost

$45 - low income

$65 - standard

$90 - pay-it-forward (if you have financial abundance, this is our pay-it-forward option to fund our full tuition scholarships)

For more information on sliding scale please check out this amazing work!

The zoom link will be sent upon registration. Recording will be available for 30 days.

Please apply here for a scholarship.

or access this knowledge share for free by enrolling as a member of the Living Library

Living Library HBC

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Accessibility Information

Virtual Gathering

*ASR (automated) captioning provided

The knowledge share zoom link will be sent out immediately upon purchase, along with any other necessary information.

Sunday May 31, 2026

3:00pm - 5:00pm Eastern Standard Time

Class will be recorded and available for 30 days. This means you can join from anywhere in the world.

Facilitator

MaKshya Tolbert practices poetry and placemaking in Virginia, where her grandmother raised her. She is the 2025 Art in Library Spaces Artist-in-Residence at the University of Virginia, and co-stewards Fernland Studios, an open-ended studio insistent on rest, rejuvenation, and reciprocity as a core compositional practice. Tolbert was the 2024 New City Arts Fellowship Guest Curator, and served as 2024-25 Chair of the Charlottesville Tree Commission. She has received fellowship and residency support from the U.S.-Italy Fulbright Commission, Cave Canem, New City Arts, Community of Writers, and Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects. Her recent poetry and prose can be found at Poem-a-Day, Emergence Magazine, West Branch, Poets for Science, and Ran Off With the Star Bassoon. She holds degrees from Stanford University, the University of Virginia, and the University of Gastronomic Sciences. Shade is a place is her first book. In her free time, she is elsewhere—a place Eddie S. Glaude Jr. calls “that physical or metaphorical place that affords the space to breathe.”