ASLE has announced the finalists for its biennial book awards and I’m excited to see a few titles reviewed here at EcoLit Books, like Sea Change, Soil and The Last Beekeeper.
Ecocritical Book Award Finalists:
Joanna Allan, Saharan Winds: Energy Systems and Aeolian Imaginaries in Western Sahara,
West Virginia University Press, 2024
Julia Fiedorczuk and Pawel Piszczatowski, eds., Places That the Map Can’t Contain: Poetics in the Anthropocene, Brill | V&R Unipress, 2023
Shannon Gayk, Apocalyptic Ecologies: From Creation to Doom in Middle English Literature,
The University of Chicago Press, 2024
Christina Gerhardt, Sea Change: An Atlas of Islands in a Rising Ocean
University of California Press, 2023
Jamie L. Jones, Rendered Obsolete: Energy Culture and the Afterlife of US Whaling
University of North Carolina Press, 2023
Jordan B. Kinder, Petroturfing: Refining Canadian Oil Through Social Media
University of Minnesota Press, 2024
John MacNeill Miller, The Ecological Plot: How Stories Gave Rise to Science
University of Virginia Press 2024
Kamala Joyce Platt, Environmental Justice Poetics: Cultural Representations of Environmental Racism from Chicanas and Women in India
De Gryuter, 2023 (Paperback coming June 30, 2025)
Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, Alexa Weik von Mossner, W. P. Malecki and Frank Hakemulder, eds., Empirical Ecocriticism: Environmental Narratives for Social Change
University of Minnesota Press, 2023
Steven Swarbrick and Jean-Thomas Tremblay, Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction
Northwestern University Press, 2024
Creative Book Award Finalists:
Lauren Camp, Worn Smooth between Devourings
NYQ Books, 2023
Julie Carrick Dalton, The Last Beekeeper
Forge, 2023
Camille T. Dungy, Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden
Simon & Schuster, 2023
Janice N. Harrington, Yard Show
BOA Editions, Ltd., 2024
Emily Raboteau, Lessons for Survival: Mothering Against “the Apocalypse”
Henry Holt & Co, 2024
Debbie Urbanski, After World: A Novel
Simon & Schuster, 2023
Winners will be announced this July and celebrated at the Authors/Awards Reception at the 2025 Conference at the University of Maryland, College Park on July 9. The finalists are books authored or edited by ASLE and international affiliate members.
John is an award-winning author of stories, novels and plays. He is author of THE STANDING DEAD, coming in 2027. He is also author of the novels The Tourist Trail and Where Oceans Hide Their Dead and co-author of the mystery Devils Island. He is editor of Writing for Animals (also now a writing program). More at JohnYunker.com.