New episode of The Emergence Room featuring Katharine Ogle, poet, scholar, mother, educator, and 2026 Rome Prize Fellow in Environmental Arts & Humanities at the American Academy in Rome. Katharine’s collaborative project with biologist Adam Summers, Piscis Romana, reimagines the field guide, the poem, and the scientific archive all at once: part bestiary, part walking guide, part ecological meditation.
In this conversation, we talked about poetry as a living practice that stretches beyond the page. We discussed balancing the layered realities of being a PhD student, a mother, a writer, a collaborator, and a person still trying to make space for curiosity and play inside institutional life. Katharine spoke beautifully about redefining poetry through collaboration, research, humor, wandering, and observation.
We also spent time talking about her creative partnership with Adam Summers, who listeners may remember from his own episode of The Emergence Room. Their project moves between science and poetics, fish anatomy and mythology, Roman mosaics and contemporary ecology. Katharine shared generous and hilarious stories about Adam, and the episode slowly unfolded into something larger about collaboration itself: how creative partnerships can blur the boundaries between teacher, student, co-conspirator, colleague, and even muse.
There was something deeply generous about this conversation. Not performative generosity, but the kind that opens space for complexity. For unfinished thoughts. For parenting while writing. For scholarship while exhausted. For art-making while building a life with other people in it.
A thoughtful, funny, expansive episode about poetry, partnership, ecology, and the delicate choreography of trying to hold all the parts of a life together at once.