The UofL English associate professor and creative writing program director is one of eight scholars chosen from ACC universities to participate in the festival’s “Bridging Chasms” conversations. Two accomplished professors from different studies – say, an author and a scientist – are paired for each exchange to explain essential elements and details from their fields in the hope of increasing understanding across disciplines.

The ACC Smithsonian Creativity and Innovation Festival also will include interactive installations from the conference’s 15 schools, including “The Sweet Way to Preserve Blood” and “Whiskey Webs” featuring UofL researchers. UofL theatre arts also will perform “The Mountaintop,” a fictional retelling of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s last night. The events are April 5-7 at the National Museum of American History.

For her part, Petrosino expects to discuss the rise in intensely personal viewpoints in contemporary poetry, with writers celebrating identity issues of race, class, gender and sexuality and incorporating their own history in their work. With that shift comes a “movement against the patriarchal gaze of traditional poetry,” she said. “What do you do with all the old stuff?”

Instead of pushing aside all the canonical works as problematic or no longer useful, she suggests that scholars need to “open up the work” and examine those standards and lesser-known pieces in different ways.

Petrosino, teaching in her ninth year at UofL and finishing up her fourth poetry volume, is venturing into the personal realm herself through the help of new national and statewide awards in her field. The National Endowment for the Arts awarded her a $25,000 creative writing fellowship this year, one of 35 in poetry. She is concluding her Al Smith Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council, one of its 16 $7,500 awards last year.

“It was really wonderful to be recognized as a Kentucky author through that grant,” she said.

She plans to use the resources to work on “White Blood,” due for 2020 publication by local literary press Sarabande Books, and a fifth, related volume.

“These two projects look at the legacies of slavery and discrimination in the Upper South,” particularly in Virginia and Kentucky. Petrosino is conducting genealogical research into her own family’s Virginia history “to see what their lives were like before and after the Civil War.”

In reclaiming this heritage, Petrosino has been trying to piece together family oral history and records for enslaved and newly freed people, plus get a sense of her relatives’ environment.

“There’s something about standing in the physical spot where certain ancestors lived,” she said. “That’s important for a poet too.”

The poem “Europe,” her favorite from her third volume, “Witch Wife,” recently attracted national and local attention. U.S. poet laureate Tracy K. Smith read and discussed it during her Feb. 18 poem-each-weekday podcast “The Slowdown,” produced in partnership with the Library of Congress and the Poetry Foundation. UofL President Neeli Bendapudi read from it during her March 5 Louisville public lecture about the liberal arts in a global economy.

Petrosino strongly believes in the liberal arts too and not just because she is a poet.

“No job I’ve ever had has been completely what it says on the job description,” she said. “If you are a person who can write well and communicate and solve problems and work with others….Even in the hard sciences, the narrative is very important.”

The state has a long history of celebrating the arts – from music to the storytelling tradition, from gastronomy to visual arts, she said. Various arts communities are collaborating and reaching out, as happened last year when Petrosino was invited to contribute a live spoken-word performance as part of the Louisville Ballet’s annual choreographers’ showcase. Louisville magazine recently asked her to write a poem reflecting on the fatal shootings at a Louisville grocery store.

“The creative economy of Kentucky and particularly Louisville has always been strong,” she said. “For there to be a creative writing program at the University of Louisville is just as it should be.”

Next year will be the 20th for the English department’s creative writing program to offer the Anne and William Axton Reading Series, which brings distinguished authors to Belknap Campus not only to share their work but also to lead free, public master classes to describe their creative process and to critique student work.

“The point of the Axton endowment is to bring students into interaction with the writers,” Petrosino said. “To have as much interaction is a unique thing.”

From the ecology of the rainforest canopy to the promise of astrosurgery to an arts-based approach to improving community health, UofL projects are among the highlights of the first ACCelerate: ACC Smithsonian Creativity and Innovation Festival in the Washington, D.C. museum’s west wing Oct. 13-15. Virginia Tech is presenting the festival with the Smithsonian.            

The festival showcases “creative exploration and research at the nexus of science, engineering, arts and design” among the 15 participating ACC schools, according to the festival . Organizers project as many as 30,000 visitors could attend during the weekend.

“I think it certainly shows that we have work going on here that has huge public impact,” said Paul DeMarco, associate dean of UofL’s School of Interdisciplinary and Graduate Studies and a professor of psychological and brain sciences. DeMarco, who plans to attend, organized UofL’s involvement and oversaw the proposal process for the student-faculty teams involved.

Although the ACC is known widely for athletic achievements, “the intent here is to show these schools have research and work that’s being done by faculty, staff and students,” DeMarco said. “It was important for us to get the students involved.”

The festival will offer 15 dramatic and musical performances, including the 4 p.m. Oct. 14 performance about the intersection of art and public health by . The project leader is graduate student Tasha Golden, a former touring songwriter who directs the Center for Art + Health Innovation within the Commonwealth Institute of Kentucky, an entity of UofL’s School of Public Health and Information Sciences. The multidisciplinary presentation of works that reveal how arts address environmental and social toxins will include Smoketown poet Hannah Drake and Justin Golden.

Biologist Steve Yanoviak from the College of Arts and Sciences and George Pantalos, bioengineering and surgery professor with UofL’s Cardiovascular Innovation Institute, will be featured with their students in interactive exhibits and also as Oct. 14 panelists on the general theme of “Interdisciplinary Thinking and Collaboration.” There are 48 total exhibits.

Pantalos and students Audrey Riggs and Justin Heidel will exhibit two projects: the pediatric cardiovascular simulator designed to train critical care pediatric hospital staff and a joint UofL and Carnegie Mellon project intended to help treat trauma and other disorders surgically in reduced gravity during space missions. Pantalos’ Oct. 14 talk (12:30 p.m. panel on health and body) will focus on the KardioKid.

Yanoviak, whose panel on environment and sustainability begins at 4 p.m., will exhibit with students Max Adams and Evan Gora about their work on the examining forest structure, lightning and insect diversity. The collaboration with other scientists from various disciplines is done primarily at the Barro Colorado Island field station in Panama administered by the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.  

The museum site for the ACCelerate Festival is on the National Mall on Constitution Avenue between Twelfth and Fourteenth streets NW. Festival hours are 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Friday-Sunday.