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Sunday May 31, 2026
with MaKshya Tolbert
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?”
Sunday May 31, 2026
with MaKshya Tolbert
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?”