The Quest for the Plant Script : Writer and Poet Sumana Roy at Yale Whitney Humanities Center

If plants could write, what stories would they tell us? What might we learn—about ourselves and the botanical world—if we learned to read, write, and translate a language rooted in vegetal life?

Join Sumana Roy as she explores why these questions have captivated our writers, artists, thinkers, and scholars over the last hundred years. In this lecture, Roy traces the evolution of our century-long fascination with the “plant script,” a term she uses to describe our various attempts to parse a language from plants.

Sumana Roy is the author of How I Became a Tree and Provincials: Postcards from the Peripheries, Missing: A Novel, My Mother’s Lover and Other Stories, and two poetry collections, Out of Syllabus and V. I. P: Very Important Plant.