Orchid Tierney,  assistant professor of English at Kenyon College, is one of two Knox County residents to be awarded a $5,000 grant from the Ohio Arts Council.

Tierney is a both a poet and scholar.

"I work in a field called environmental humanities," she told the Mount Vernon News. "I'm very interested in things like climate change, waste and waste management, and botany. In some ways, both in the scholarly and poetic way, I like to combine those things through poetry but also through scholarship."

When people ask her what she does for a living, she jokingly says, "I work in garbage." The reply is often, "What has that go to do with poetry?" she said.

She is from New Zealand, where her interest in the environment developed.

"We love our greenery," she said of her home country. "We also love our nature. I've always been invested in some respects in the natural world."

While earning her doctorate degree at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, she also developed an interest in urban nature.

"I began looking at poets who engaged in the environment, both in rural and urban settings," she said. "It is ... a coalescence of sorts, drawing on my two interests of poetry and the environment. Poetry is kind of a way to engage and explore the natural world."

She has written extensively about climate change.

"My first collection, which was published in 2019, was very much about climate change," she said. 

While living in Philadelphia, she saw a plastic bag caught in a ginkgo tree just outside her apartment.

"I started thinking, 'How did it get there?'" she said."I suddenly found myself exploring fossil fuels, the fracking industry. I really started exploring how embedded we are in fossil fuels, how vital it is but also the kinds of problems that have emerged such as climate change and pollution."  

The grant will help her attend writing residencies in Nebraska and Kentucky. She also plans to photograph local flora.

"The grant will support travel to go around Ohio and take photographs of flora that I can then incorporate into the collection that I'm working on," Tierney said.

She will write poems on the future of flora in Ohio.

"What will Ohio look like 300 years into the future?" she asked. "This collection is engaging in climate change through images and poetry."