Guest: katie robinson

Hosts: Erin Sharkey & Michael Kleber-Diggs

Recorded in Minneapolis (Bde Óta Othúŋwe) on unceded Dakota land.

= BOOKS DISCUSSED =

The Negroes Send Their Love: Poems, Perspectives, and Possible Futures, by Sean Hill (Milkweed Editions, 2026)

A Darker Wilderness: Black Nature Writing from Soil to Stars, edited by Erin Sharkey (Milkweed Editions 2023)

Into a Darker Wilderness podcast

Sponsored by Milkweed Editions

Producer: Davi Gray

Sound Editor: Claire Barnes

= Guest Bio =

Dr. Katie Robinson (any pronouns) is a writer, facilitator, scholar, and interdisciplinary artist devoted to the exploration of what is present and possible outside of the white supremacist colonial imagination. Their essay, "Here's How I Let Them Come Close," a meditation on encounters, extraterrestrials, and the creative process, was featured in A Darker Wilderness: Black Nature Writing from Soil to Stars from Milkweed in 2023. They recently completed a PhD at Pacifica Graduate Institute, where their dissertation, Toward a New Metaphysics of Political Struggle: Explorations into Abolitionist Subjectivites, explores abolitionist praxis as an ontological project — examining how Minneapolis-based abolitionists enact decolonial, relational worlds through creative anti-carceral practice amid escalating political violence.

= Selected Topics Discussed =

• Kinetic Art
• David Butler
• Extraterrestrial conversations
• Akashic records
• Poetic vs. academic writing
• New epistemologies for social justice movements
• Episodic and nonbinary thinking
• Grasshoppers
• Wasps
• Northeast Minneapolis
• Lake Bde Maka Ska
• Tarot and synchronicity