In 1965, poet Wendell Berry returned home to Henry County, Kentucky, where he bought a small farmhouse and began a life of farming, writing, and teaching. This lifelong relationship with the land and community would come to form the core of his proli c writings. Today, Henry County, like many rural communities across America, has become a place of quiet ideological struggle, where the traditional agrarian virtues of simplicity, land stewardship, sustainable farming, local economies, and rootedness to place have been replaced by a capital-intensive and ecologically-destructive model of industrial agriculture.

At this symposium, cosponsored by the USC DORNSIFE COLLEGE ENGLISH DEPARTMENT, USC LIBRARIES, and RUSKIN ART CLUB, poets and scholars from across the country assess Berry’s role as one of the most passionate and eloquent voices in defense of agrarian life.