A Natural History of the Spirits: Reading the Living World

Jori Lewis in conversation with Idrissa Simmonds-Nastili What if the natural world is not simply something we inhabit, but something that remembers? A baobab tree. A seashell. A watermelon. A flower. Ordinary things, perhaps. But each carries extraordinary stories of migration, colonialism, memory, belief, and belonging. In A Natural History of the Spirits, journalist and author Jori Lewis moves between scientific discovery, myth, folklore, and cultural history to explore how the living world holds traces of our collective past, and how the stories we tell about nature reveal who we are. From threatened seashells carrying both spiritual and monetary value to the restless spirits of Senegal's coastline, Lewis asks us tolook more closely at the plants, animals, and places through which we make meaning of theworld. In conversation with Lewis will be Idrissa Simmonds-Nastili, Oakland-based writer, poet, and curator of the literary salon Brunch & Word, whose work explores identity, imagination, and the stories we inherit. The evening begins with a short introduction from cultural anthropologist and Clio's founding member Cari Borja, reflecting on how cultures read meaning into the natural world, and how the histories of people and places become inseparable. What might we discover if we learned to see the natural world not only as a resource, but as an archive of memory, spirit, and human experience? Join us for a conversation about nature, history, the unseen, and the extraordinary ways the world continues to tell its stories. Jori Lewis writes narrative nonfiction that explores how people interact with their environments. Her reports and essays have been published in The Atlantic, Orion Magazine, and The New York Review of Books, among others, and she is the editor in chief of Adi Magazine, a literary magazine of global politics. The author of Slaves for Peanuts (winner of a Whiting Award, a Silvers Grant, a James Beard Award, and the Harriet Tubman Prize) and A Natural History of the Spirits, Lewis splits her time between Illinois and Senegal. Idrissa Simmonds-Nastili is a Haitian-American, Jamaican-Canadian writer, poet, and essayist. She holds an MFA in fiction from Warren Wilson College. Her work has most recently appeared in Vogue.com, Adi Magazine, O Magazine, Lithub, Wired, and elsewhere. She has been a finalist for the Commonwealth Short Story Award, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Award. She is the curator of Brunch & Word, a bicoastal literary salon. Her roots are in Brooklyn, New York, and Surrey, British Columbia, and she calls Oakland home. Her debut novel Backstitch will be published in early 2027 by Flatiron Books in the US and Pan Macmillan in the UK.