Raised by factory workers, CAConrad learned as a child to avoid the present. When you work in factories, you become an extension of a machine for most of the day, and to survive this job, you shut the present off and let your brain live in the past and the future. (Soma)tic poetry rituals emerge from CA knowing they needed a new relationship with time; the rituals anchoring them into an “extreme present,” where it is impossible to think about anything except what is in front of you.

CAConrad has been writing poetry for over 50 years and working with (Soma)tic poetry rituals for over 20 years. In this talk, CA will show images and discuss the evolution of these rituals for writing poetry and how they have been used to confront the destruction of our environment and to heal from the rape and murder of their boyfriend in Tennessee. We will also talk about rituals everyone can use in their lives and homes to write poems. In these troubling times, our creativity will help us find the solutions for survival. Survivors need healthy, thriving imaginations!

Former US-Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith wrote in The New York Times, "CAConrad's poems invite the reader to become an agent in a joint act of recovery, to step outside of passivity and propriety and to become susceptible to the illogical and the mysterious."