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.”

“The Poetry Derby prioritizes a playful approach to language and form, capitalizing on the fact that horses are measured in hands and poems are traditionally measured in feet,” said Kristi Maxwell, the UofL assistant professor of English organizing the competition.

“In keeping with the horsey theme, participants will write modified sonnets of 16 lines (rather than 14) as a nod to the average height of thoroughbreds, which is 16 hands. That said, the poems’ contents do not have to be horse-themed.”

High school students and adults in Louisville and surrounding areas can submit sonnets for the contest during the March 1-15 entry period. Poets can send in up to three poems, but no more than one per writer will be selected.

All submissions must be typed, marked “adult” or “high school,” and include contact information (name, mailing address, telephone number and email address). Entries can be sent by email to kentuckypoetryderby@gmail.com or mail to Poetry Derby, c/o Kristi Maxwell, 315 Bingham Humanities Building, 2216 S. First St., University of Louisville, Louisville KY 40292, with a postmark between March 1 and 15.

Leading up to that, Derby hopefuls have been participating in free monthly community workshops Maxwell leads at the Kentucky Derby Museum. The walk-in workshop include an introduction to the sonnet form and poetic meter, writing exercises and a chance to share work. The last free Thursday workshop is from 3 to 4:30 p.m. March 7.

Additionally, Maxwell’s undergraduate and graduate students have led poetry workshops in several Louisville high schools as part of their “Teaching of Creative Writing” course. Those will include St. Francis, Marion C. Moore, duPont Manual, Iroquois and Fern Creek.

Poems (8-12 by high school writers and 8-12 by adults) will be selected for the April 22 reading and Kentucky Derby Museum celebration, with each category including a win, place and show. Event collaborators are the museum and UofL’s English department and Commonwealth Center for the Humanities and Society. Organizers hope the Poetry Derby will become annual.

The Jefferson County Public Schools Storytelling Project is a community outreach program that involves UofL English graduate students introducing middle- and high-school students to digital storytelling techniques and tools such as iMovie. The English department sponsors the program with UofL’s Commonwealth Center for the Humanities and Society.

After a series of informal workshops, 15 students at Marion C. Moore School worked on a short documentary, “Freedom of Voice,” that was screened at the museum in a Sunday program that also featured poetry performances and a fashion show. The film represented the Moore students’ “personal and political experiences through their words, their camera lenses and their microphones,” organizers said.

Under the graduate students’ guidance, the Moore students developed storyboards to outline their work and shot, edited and produced the documentary. .

The work grew out of discussions and art projects from the weekly after-school club Cultural Dialoguers, which aims to build bridges of understanding between cultures and to advocate for social justice.

UofL student coordinators Patrick Danner and Caitlin Ray both termed the work with the Moore students among the more rewarding projects and experiences of college life, according to their .

“The students are so open, so engaged and so excited to tell their stories and speak their mind,” Danner said. “I’m usually exhausted on the drive there and inspired on the drive home. These students inspire me to listen better, engage more and step back from instruction and into the role of collaborator.”

Throughout the process the younger students explored hot-button issues such as gun control, sexual harassment, gender stereotypes and racial discrimination as they responded to current and cultural events that affected them.

“Highlights of our work at Moore have included generating ideas with a group of middle school students for a video essay about eating disorders, recording a performance/discussion with the Okolona community at South Central (Regional) Public Library and facilitating a roundtable discussion after the Parkland (Florida) shooting about the students’ thoughts about safety and gun violence in their community,” Ray said. “I am always struck by the level of critical awareness and thoughtfulness they bring to each meeting and always look forward to spending my Thursdays at Moore.”