Come join us for a screening of the film Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World, followed by a Q&A with Sasha Waters, the film’s director.

If poetry had a pop icon, Mary Oliver would be it. Celebrated best-selling poet, Pulitzer Prize-winner, lover of dogs and long walks in the woods, openly queer but intensely private, Oliver was America’s unlikely contemporary mystic, stalking the ponds and forests of Cape Cod for nearly 50 years in order to open herself—and her readers—to the known and unknowable world. From a lonely childhood to literary fame, Oliver’s life was shaped by devotion to nature, paying attention, and the long journey toward learning to love and to be loved. Her poems inspire liberals and conservatives, atheists and believers, naturalists and urbanites, speaking directly to contemporary anxieties about attention, presence, and the human relationship with the natural world—issues that feel especially pressing in an era of climate crisis, digital distraction, and social fragmentation.

Sasha Waters is a professor of Film at Virginia Commonwealth University’s School of the Arts in Richmond, Va.

This event is free and open to the Springfield College community and the public.