Jenny Irish's HATCH: A Speculative Future for Reproductive Rights

The prose poems in Jenny Irish's newest collection, Hatch, trace the consciousness of an artificial womb that must confront the role she has played in the continuation of the dying of the human species. This apocalyptic vision engages with the most pressing concerns of this contemporary sociopolitical moment: reproductive rights, climate crises, and mass extinction; gender and racial bias in healthcare and technology; disinformation, conspiracy theories, and pseudoscience; and the possibilities and dangers of artificial intelligence. More intimately, Hatch considers questions about how motherhood and its cultural expectations shape female identity. Working with avant strategies, Irish crafts a speculative feminist narrative, excavating and reexamining the aspects of the American experience that should have served as a call to action but have not. Part elegy and part prophecy, Hatch warns of a possible future while speaking to the present moment.

At this workshop, Professor Irish will give a reading from Hatch, after which she'll be joined in conversation by Dr. Angela Lober, Clinical Associate Professor and Director of the Academy of Lactation Programs at the Edson College of Nursing and Health Innovation. Come ready with your own questions and comments about the future of reproductive health in the face of climate change, misinformation, and other problems facing our present and our future.

Hosted by the Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics, the ASU Worldbuilding Initiative invites all members of our community—at ASU and beyond it—to come together in mutual inspiration, communal thinking, and imaginative play. In each of our workshops, audience members will be encouraged to engage in worldbuilding alongside our guest presenters, inventing new ways of imagining and interacting with the world around us.   

This hybrid event is free and open to the public, in addition to the ASU community. It will be held on the Tempe Campus and simultaneously livestreamed via Zoom, with full participation in the night's activities possible online or in-person.

About the Guest Speakers

Jenny Irish is the author most recently of Hatch, and of the hybrid poetry collections Common Ancestor (Black Lawrence, 2017) and Tooth Box (Spuyten Duyvil, 2021), the short story collection I Am Faithful  (Black Lawrence, 2019), the chapbook Lupine (Black Lawrence, 2023) and most recently Hatch (Northwestern University Press, 2024). She teaches creative writing at Arizona State University and facilitates free community workshops every summer. 

Dr. Angela Lober is a community advocate, academic, and writer. She has been a registered nurse since 2001 and an International Board Certified Lactation consultant since 2005, providing evidence-based care to families in her community. She is involved in multiple professional and community organizations supporting families. Angela’s research is focused on establishing lactation and breastfeeding as a public health imperative. She is dedicated to working for a better world for families. Angela is also committed to education and mentorship as a means of uplifting and uniting the maternal-child nursing profession.