Kerri Arsenault is a literary and cultural critic, director and co-founder of The Environmental Storytelling Studio (TESS), and author of Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains. Her writing has been published in the Boston Globe, The Paris Review, the New York Review of Books, Freeman’s, the Washington Post, and the New York Times. She is also part of the teaching ensemble at The New School of the Anthropocene.
Mill Town won the Rachel Carson Environment Book Award from the Society of Environmental Journalists, the Maine Literary Award for nonfiction, and an Inge Feltrinelli Prize, dedicated to women writers who have used their voices in defense of human rights. Mill Town was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Leonard Prize, the Eric Zencey Prize in Ecological Economics, the New England Independent Booksellers Association nonfiction prize, the New England Society Book Awards, the Connecticut Book Awards, and a semi-finalist for the Chautauqua Prize.
Kerri was the Democracy Fellow at Harvard’s Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History and a fellow at the Science History Institute in Philadelphia. Her work has also been supported by Chatham University’s Falk School of Sustainability as the Rachel Carson Scholar; the Rachel Carson Center for Environment & Society at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München; University of Oregon’s Center for Environmental Futures; and the Architectural League of New York, where she co-edited a report about the status of small town America. She has been a resident at Litteraturhuset in Oslo, Norway; Corsicana Artist and Writer Residency in Texas; and Bread Loaf at Middlebury College, Vermont.
Kerri has mentored writers at Harvard University, the New City Critics Fellow program for the Urban Design Forum, and the PEN America Prison and Justice writing program. She has also been a member of the American Society for Environmental History, Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance, PEN America, and the National Book Critics Circle, where she formerly served on the Board.
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Author photos by Erik Madigan Heck.