New Podcast: John Yunker joins The Afterword for a Chat About Environmental Stories

Author and EcoLit Books co-founder John Yunker joined guest Joelle Teachey, executive director of Trees Upstate, for a podcast focused on environmental literature. The Afterword is a podcast devoted to the “future of words” and is hosted by Amy Bowling and Holland Webb. You can listen to it here. You can also subscribe via iTunes.

The list of outlets for environmental writing turns 70

As in there are now 70 of them. Thanks for everyone who contributed. We actually just received another contribution today so the list will be turning 71 shortly. The next challenge is how best to organize this list. Alpha sorting is a nice start but I’d love to improve upon it. Any suggestions are welcome…

Writing Opportunity: Michigan Quarterly Review

Here’s a unique opportunity for writers of essays, fiction, poetry and, well, pretty much anything that focuses on water. Deadline is December 1st. Michigan Quarterly Review (MQR) is seeking submissions for Not One Without: A Special Issue on Water. The edition seeks to explore urgent, complex, and revelatory writing on water from around the world. …

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New Opportunities for Writers

It’s submissions season for us writers and here are a few of particular interest to writers of environmental literature: Fire and Water Stories Fire & Water: Stories from the Anthropocene will be a print anthology of short literary fiction from writers with diverse perspectives and artistic approaches that explore our current reality on a changing …

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Braiding Sweetgrass: Finding a way through environmental despair

At the ASLE conference earlier this summer I heard this book referenced in a number of sessions. And now, having read it, I realize why. Braiding Sweetgrass is a rich collection of essays about plants and animals, indigenous and scientific awareness, and our tenuous relationship with nature. But more than that, it is the story …

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“Penguins are in trouble”

This from a sobering research report published last week by some of the world’s leading experts on penguins. The report notes that “more than half of the world’s 18 penguin species are declining.” The three species most in danger are: African penguin Galápagos penguin Yellow-eyed penguin (seen below in New Zealand) The report notes that …

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The Emergence of Vegan Studies: Q & A with Laura Wright, author of Through a Vegan Studies Lens

Laura Wright is a professor of English at Western Carolina University.  In 2015, she introduced the field of Vegan Studies through her book The Vegan Studies Project: Food, Animals, and Gender in the Age of Terror (University of Georgia Press).  She followed this book up in 2019 with Through a Vegan Studies Lens (University of …

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Writing Opportunity: Terrain Contest in Poetry, Nonfiction and Fiction

Terrain, one of the premier environmental journals, is now holding its 10th-annual writing contest across three genres. The judges are: Camille T. Dungy, PoetryCamille T. Dungy, the award-winning author of Trophic Cascade and four other poetry collections, is the editor of Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry.  Alison Hawthorne Deming, NonfictionAlison Hawthorne Deming is the author …

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Notes from the ASLE Conference in Davis, California

ASLE is the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment. Every other year, the organization hosts a conference; this year it was at the University of California at Davis, and we drove down to participate. I’m told there were more than 1,200 attendees, a conference record, and a sign that environmental literature is …

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Dominion: A Christian writes about hunting, factory farming, and other sins against animals

Several years ago, I heard about a Republican, a former speech writer for George W. Bush, who had written a book in favor of protecting animals. I also heard that he was vegetarian (now vegan). I initially wondered if hell had frozen over. I’m joking, but only slightly. Because it was just a few months …

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Silent Spring & Other Writings on the Environment: And our irrational, insatiable, unsustainable desire to control nature

I feel ashamed to admit this, but until recently I had not read, end to end, Silent Spring. I had read parts of the book over the years and have been acutely aware of what the book is about — and perhaps this was the reason I avoided it for so long.  But when I saw …

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Book Review: The End of Ice by Dahr Jamail

Dahr Jamail’s The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption is at once a memoir of the author’s experiences in nature and a report of the state of the planet amid rapid climate change. This well-researched, passionate book is about the end of more than ice—Jamail takes us …

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LitHub’s climate change library

If we lived on this planet only one day a year then perhaps celebrating one “Earth Day” a year would make more sense. But as LitHub points out, every day is earth day. And they are assembling an ambitious list of 365 books for your climate change library, beginning with the classics. It’s nice to …

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The best environmental books we’ve read in 2018

This is our third year of recapping the best books we’ve read over the past year. Here are the 2017 and 2016 lists. We’re so glad that the number of both readers and reviewers of EcoLit Books have grown enough to now have an annual tradition of celebrating our favorite books of the year. And …

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