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 …
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 …
Western Colorado University has launched a new MA/MFA program devoted to nature writing, which they are calling Earth StoryCraft: Earth StoryCraft marks intersecting social & environmental emergencies. We encourage imaginative storytelling for resistance & renewal of land This program joins our growing list of Environmental Humanities and Writing Programs. If you know of a program …
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 …
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 …
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 …
If you’re a poet focused on environmental issues, the Ginkgo Prize is worth investigating. Submissions are not free (the first poem is is £7), but the awards are significant and the judges are Homero Aridjis and Jen Hadfield. The prize is in its second year and is funded by the Edward Goldsmith Foundation. The competition …
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 …
Today is World Penguin Day— not that we need a reason to celebrate these amazing little creatures, but it’s great to have a designated day on which everyone thinks about these birds and how they’re faring in such a rapidly changing world. So, how exactly are the penguins doing? According to the International Union for Conservation of …
This imagined prehistory is undeniably the crowning achievement in Schrefer’s ape quartet, at once brimming with hope and loss, love and cruelty, constantly challenging the reader to question, in six hundred thousand years, how much and how little we’ve evolved.
Through a Vegan Studies Lens: Textual Ethics and Lived Activism, edited by Laura Wright, is part of the series “Cultural Ecologies of Food in the 21st Century” from the University of Nevada Press, bringing attention to the ways in which our food choices “produce ecologies of effects, environmentally and otherwise.” I am thrilled to see …
The winter issue of Minding Nature (published by our contributor The Center for Humans and Nature out now and well worth reading (free download here). This issue features essays about democratic ecological citizenship, reflections on birdsong, sword ferns, and the cultural wisdom of animals, artistic responses to the Anthropocene, and some beautiful poetry scattered throughout.
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 …
Here’s an exciting new call for submissions from the UiO (University of Oslo) Department of Sociology and Human Geography: Attention writers and humanities researchers: this is a call for narratives that bring us closer to the potentiality of the present and activate “the politics of the possible” in our changing climate. Twelve stories will be …
What I most missed after a trip to Australia last year wasn’t the beaches or the local accents. It was the sounds of the birds. The plaintive cries of the Australian ravens, the laughing kookaburras, and the screeching cockatoos. I realized after I returned home that I never had associated Australia with exotic birds. This …
