Laura Brown-Lavoie

The Emergent Forest + Avena Botanicals + Union Theological Seminary

I am a poet, performer, plant person, and birth doula. After 8 years running a squat vegetable farm in the Narragansett homelands of Rhode Island, I turned in the direction of tending medicinal plants under the instruction of my teacher Deb Soule at Avena Botanicals on Penobscot homelands in midcoast Maine. My first book of poetry CLUB DESIRE (2022) takes place in a strip club on the Providence river where histories of extraction are undressed. I am collaborating with fellow earth workers on an urban orchard + green burial project called The Emergent Forest, and am currently enrolled in a Masters of Divinity program at Union Theological Seminary in New York City.