Poetics and Plant Medicine

States of Euphoria | January 15

hannah baer is a clinical psychologist based in New York. She is the author of the nonfiction book, trans girl suicide museum. Her second book, The Life of the Party, is forthcoming in 2027. She is a psychoanalytic candidate and a contributing editor to Parapraxis.  

Future Residues | March 12

Brandon Brown is the author of several books including, most recently, Work (Atelos) and The Four Seasons (Wonder). In 2024, Free Poetry published his translation of the extant works of the troubadour Raimbaut d'Aurenga, Joy Is My Hotel. Brown's writing on art and culture has appeared in Art in America, Frieze, The Believer, Fanzine among other venues. He has been the recipient of the Beauchamp Prize for Critical Art Writing and a National Endowment of the Arts fellowship in poetry. In 2026, Roof will publish a new book of poetry which contextualizes plant medicine and pop music as interpenetrating catalysts to meditation, grief and recovery. He is a co-editor at Krupskaya Books and occasionally publishes the zine Panda's Friend. He lives in Richmond, CA.

Healing Terroirs | April 24

Mary Carreón is a journalist and editor who spends a lot of time at the crossroads of art, music, drugs, and the systems that shape how we live with all three: drug policy, the environment, and culture more broadly. Currently, she is the Editor-in-Chief at DoubleBlind, where she empowers writers to craft stories that spark meaningful dialogue and encourage readers to think and engage with diverse issues. 

Her work has appeared in Billboard, KCRW/NPR, Insider, The LAnd Magazine, High Times, OC Weekly, LA Weekly, and elsewhere. An experienced moderator, Mary has shared her perspective on panels at conferences including Wonderland Miami, SXSW, and MAPS’s Psychedelic Science. She also recently graduated from UCLA’s paralegal studies program. When she's not working, you can find her under a disco ball on a dancefloor or making a great escape to the forest.

Future Residues | March 12

Born in 1985 in Carolina, Puerto Rico and based between Caguas, Puerto Rico + Oakland, California, Sofía Córdova makes work that considers science fiction as alternative history, colonial contamination, climate change and migration, and most recently, revolution—historical and imagined. Córdova lately models those things into tragedy, comedy, disorientation. Her work has been exhibited at The Whitney Museum of American Art, Tufts University Galleries, and the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo among others. She is a recent recipient of Creative Capital and Trellis Fund Awards.

She works in performance, video, sound, music, installation, photography, and sometimes taxidermy. She is also one half of the music duo and experimental sound outfit XUXA SANTAMARIA.

Commodified Journeys | April 1

Neşe Devenot, PhD (they/them) is a Senior Lecturer in the University Writing Program at Johns Hopkins University, where they conduct interdisciplinary research across the fields of medical humanities, psychedelic studies, bioethics, harm reduction, poetics, and comparative literature. They are a board member at Psymposia, a psychedelic harm reduction nonprofit, and an affiliated researcher with the Project on Psychedelics Law and Regulation (POPLAR) at the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School. A psychedelic humanities researcher since 2010, Devenot helped establish Psychedelic Studies as an interdisciplinary field by articulating the necessity of humanities frameworks for understanding psychedelic experiences. Since then, they have developed critiques of pseudoscientific justifications for therapeutic touch in psychedelic-assisted therapy and of corporate capture in the psychedelic industry. They were first author and lead architect of a book-length investigative report, “The Psychedelic Syndicate: How Silicon Valley Used Veterans to Hijack the Psychedelic Industry.” Their ongoing book project, Chemical Poetics: The Literary History of Psychedelic Science, examines the function of narrative and literary devices in structuring psychedelic experiences. Each chapter explores a different literary strategy for altering the “conditions of possibility” for reality in the present — the poetic techniques by which psychedelic authors have sought to change minds and worlds.

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Paul Ebenkamp is author of The Louder the Room the Darker the Screen (Timeless, Infinite Light), Late Hiss (Desert Pavilion) and Regular Acid Consciousness (Spiral Editions).With Andrew Kenower he curates and hosts the Woolsey Heights reading series. 

Commodified Journeys | April 1

Patricia Kubala is a PhD candidate in socio-cultural anthropology at UC Berkeley. Her dissertation project, Psychedelic Reckonings, is a study of how concepts of ancestry, inheritance, and intergenerational transmission animate contemporary practices of working with psychedelics and plant medicines in the United States. Her research considers not only the promise but also the dilemmas involved in the project of laboring for a psychedelic “otherwise” — for an ethics, therapeutics, and metaphysics adequate to reckoning with planetary ecological crisis and unresolved legacies of epistemic and material colonial and settler-colonial violence.

States of Euphoria | January 15

Michelle Lhooq is a writer who, by some combination of tenacity and youthful ingenuity, decided to make a career out of being really, really good at partying. She was born in Singapore, an anti-hedonic country that William Gibson famously called “Disneyland with the death penalty,” and growing up under its extreme restrictions on assorted freedoms made her obsessed with drugs and nightlife like a bad kink. Lhooq's work, mainly published in her newsletter Rave New World, is currently centered on the shifting paradigms of counterculture, underground raves, and psychedelics; recent articles have covered neo-wooks in Oregon's weed country, Taipei's techno scene, and ayahuasca gummies. 

She is the author of  WEED: Everything You Want to Know But Are Always Too Stoned to Ask(Penguin Random House), and her writing can also be found in The Guardian, GQ, The Los Angeles Times, and Bloomberg. Once in a blue moon, she throws psychedelic parties in Los Angeles, where she is based. 

Commodified Journeys | April 1

Sarah Miller writes for many publications including the newyorker.com, parisreview.com and n + 1, where Pirates of the Ayahuasca appeared recently. Her Substack is The Real Sarah Miller. She lives in Nevada City. 

Healing Terroirs | April 24

Patricia Powell is a writer, healer, facilitator, a student of shamanism and plant meditation for over a decade, and a professor of English at Mills College at Northeastern University. Her novels include The Pagoda and The Fullness of Everything.

States of Euphoria | January 15

Arun Saldanha is professor in the Department of Geography, Environment, and Society at the University of Minnesota. He is author of Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race and published further books and articles on theory and music. He is finishing an edited collection called Prince from Minneapolis based on a symposium. He dances to Detroit techno.

Future Residues | March 12

Darieck Scott is a professor of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Scott is the author of Keeping It Unreal: Black Queer Fantasy and Superhero Comics (NYU Press, 2022), which won the 2023 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ+ Studies. His previous book, Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination (NYU Press 2010), was awarded the 2011 Alan Bray Memorial Prize for Queer Studies of the Modern Language Association. Scott is the author of the novels The Dream-Slaves (2024), Hex (2007) and Traitor to the Race (1995), and the editor of Best Black Gay Erotica (2004). He has published essays in Callaloo, GLQ, The Americas Review, and American Literary History, and is co-editor with Ramzi Fawaz of the American Literature special issue, “Queer About Comics,” winner of the 2018 Best Special Issue from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals.