Poetics and Plant Medicine

A four-part public reading and conversation series bringing together poets, experimental prose writers, artists, scholars, journalists, and editors working on aesthetics and psychedelic culture, co-curated by Stephanie Young and Ramsey McGlazer.

The series opens on January 15 with States of Euphoria and continues in March and April.

All events will be held at Bathers Library in Oakland, CA.

  • Thursday, January 15, 7pm

    States of Euphoria features hannah baer, Michelle Lhooq, and Arun Saldanha in conversation about rave culture and the politics of collective pleasure. Long imagined as a site of utopian possibility, the dance floor offers a fleeting glimpse of freedom and psychedelic transcendence—if only for the night. As these three writers show, the liberatory promises of the rave sit uneasily alongside its entanglements with capitalism, colonialism, and state violence. The party has always been part of the world it seeks to escape. What forms of political desire emerge, or falter, when the rave confronts the conditions it inhabits? As baer writes: “If we agree that we do not like the way things are, we must ask over and over again, are we subverting them?”

  • Thursday, March 12, 7 pm

    How do shifts in perception change the meaning of inherited histories? Future Residues convenes Brandon Brown, Sofía Córdova, and Darieck Scott to read from and discuss work that moves across temporal registers to imagine new forms of relation and collective survival. If the future is no longer imagined as coming after a clean break with the past, what kinds of worlds might be made from what remains? Drawing on popular culture, performance, and speculative genres, these artists and writers approach the damages of the past as sites of transformation rather than closure. In their work, living on becomes an aesthetic and ethical practice that allows for new kinds of knowledge and affiliation—offering glimpses of what plant medicine can make thinkable.

  • Details forthcoming. Updates will be shared via the mailing list.

    Commodified Journeys examines how psychedelic healing cultures and tourism are shaped, standardized, and sold—holding together both their transformative promise and what is lost when experience is made to fit market logics.

  • Details forthcoming. Updates will be shared via the mailing list.

    Healing Terroirs traces healing practices rooted in place. Drawing on Indigenous and Black traditions, the event considers how spiritual knowledge is carried through ritual, kinship, and plant ecologies.

  • Details forthcoming. Updates will be shared via the mailing list.

    In March and April, we’ll facilitate a reading group at Bathers Library to think about and discuss work by writers, artists, scholars and journalists in the series. Watch for sign-up info in the new year.

Poetics and Plant Medicine begins with the observation that, to date, a handful of nonfiction books have come to define the psychedelic “renaissance” in a way that no work of poetry or literary fiction has. Books like Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind have captured the public imagination and informed two decades of advocacy: a resurgence of clinical trials, philanthropic investments, infusions of venture capital, and the return of psychedelic study to the very universities where their escape in the 1960s contributed to their criminalization. Or so one story goes.

This literature of advocacy has produced, in turn, a rich array of critical and alternative accounts that take up colonial histories and the racialized War on Drugs; foreground Indigenous sovereignty; and assess not only the therapeutic potential of psychedelics but also the biotech and pharmaceutical interests that shape who can access them, where, and how. If the episteme of advocacy has conditioned our understanding of these molecules as medicine, their current status reflects something crucial about the status of therapy and spirituality in the United States today.

At the same time, contemporary writers and artists continue to metabolize psychedelic experience in forms that exceed familiar narratives. Their works approach the edge of what can be represented in language as they consider the relation between expanded consciousness, history, place, and collective life.  

In a series of four conversations, we’ll gather with writers across disciplines to discuss the liberatory potential, commodification, and state entanglements of rave culture; psychedelic tourism, climate grief, and the wellness bourgeoisie; healing traditions and their terroirs; and what becomes thinkable in psychedelic culture beyond advocacy.

  • A photograph of hannah baer. baer has short brown hair and wears a dark hoodie. She is sitting at a restaurant table, making a playful face with tongue slightly out, with a drink and utensils on the table behind her.

    hannah baer

    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.  

  • A photograph of poet Brandon Brown wearing a cowboy hat, chambray shirt, and holding an ice cream cone.

    Brandon Brown

    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.

  • Mary Carreón

    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.

  • A photograph of Sofía Córdova. Cordova has dark curly hair pinned up above her head and is sitting in front of a plain wall. She is looking into the camera seriously.

    Sofía Córdova

    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.

  • Paul Ebencamp

    Series Logo & Poster Design

    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. 

  • Patricia Kubala

    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.

  • A photograph of Michelle Lhooq. Lhooq is sitting on a graffiti-covered surface with her leg resting on it under a bridge in an urban area, with pedestrians crossing the street behind her.

    Michelle Lhooq

    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 countryTaipei'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. 

  • Sarah Miller

    Commodified Journeys | April 1

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

  • Patricia Powell

    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.

  • A photograph of Arun Saldanha. Saldanha has curly hair,  a short beard, and is wearing large black glasses. He is standing in front of a white brick wall.

    Arun Saldanha

    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.

  • Darieck Scott

    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. 

  • Colorful poster with bubble letter font that says 'Poetics and Plant Medicine' and 'January 15, 2026' and a list of names 'hannah baer, Michelle Lhooq, Arun Saldhana' and the location 'Bathers Library'. Hand-drawn illustration of foot and large eye.

Posters and logo design by Paul Ebencamp.

This project was supported financially by the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics (BCSP) and its Psychedelics in Society and Culture initiative, funded by Flourish Trust. The Psychedelics in Society and Culture Fellowship Program is a collaborative initiative between the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics (BCSP) and the Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry (CICI).