Walking. So simple, and yet putting one foot in front of the other is one of the most profound things you can do for your creative practice. In this episode of Emerging Form, we speak with award-winning poet and painter Valencia Robin about how walking has inspired her practice. We bring in science to support what we all know intuitively–moving the body helps open the brain. And Robin (as we call her throughout the podcast) shares poems by contemporary poets and herself, too, that invoke the art of walking. 

Valencia Robin’s debut poetry collection, Ridiculous Light, is the winner of Persea Books’ Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize, a finalist for the 2020 Kate Tufts Discovery Award and was named one of the best poetry books of 2019 by Library Journal. Robin’s other honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Emily Clark Balch Award, the Hocking Hills Power of Poetry Prize and fellowships from Cavé Cahnem, the Furious Flower Poetry Center, the University of Virginia, Bennington College and the Vermont College of Fine Arts. A poetry instructor as well as a co-director of the University of Virginia Young Writers Workshop, Robin has an MFA in Creative Writing from  the University of Virginia and an MFA in Art & Design from the University of Michigan, where she also co-founded GalleryDAAS. Also a painter and curator, Robin’s visual work has been exhibited nationally and supported by the King-Chavez-Parks Future Faculty Fellowship and the Center for the Education of Women’s Margaret Towsley Fellowship.

Valencia Robin’s website

Stanford study finds walking improves creativity

Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking

Ross Gay, “To the Fig Tree on 9th and Christian”

Ada Limón, “During the Impossible Age of Everyone” 

Valencia Robin, “After Graduate School”

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