Presenter Biography

Jen Lighty has lived on Block Island for the past ten years, giving birth to her spirit through writing, dancing, singing, playing her flute, riding waves and her bike, falling in love and allowing her heart to break. She has walked on rocky beaches, watched sunsets and an occasional sunrise, come face to face with deer, watched eagles soar at the North Point, had her life saved by two great black-backed gulls, and followed many butterflies. Her intimate relationship with the land and creature-beings of Block Island is the generative point for her own creative work as a writer, singer and dancer, and is the core of her workshops, which allow people to open to new ways of seeing and being through direct access to the natural world. She is a certified JourneyDance teacher and completed Earth Activist Training with Starhawk and Penny Livingston-Stark, where she received a certificate in permaculture, as well as training in how to combine activism and magic. On a more traditional level, she has a Master's in English from the Bread Loaf School of English, Middlebury College, and was a student in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. Her poems have appeared in publications such as Prairie Schooner, Poet Lore, Water-Stone Review, The North American Review, and The Providence Journal. She is the author of two books of poems, Siren, and the recently published Bluebell: The Apocalypse Diary.