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“Writing and Reading the Environment”— This panel is part of the Brooklyn Book Festival bookends events and in collaboration with Orion Magazine, the National Book Critics Circle, and as part of the Center for Fiction’s “ON AMERICA” series that explores issues important to all Americans as we approach the 2020 election: Who are we? Who are we becoming? How do the stories we tell shape who we are as a nation?
Our panel will address questions such as how might we make "nature" or "environmental" writing escape the Lone Enraptured Male gaze, as Kathleen Jamie put it, and engage with the places and peoples vital to a moment of industrial pollution, climate crisis, and rapid species loss? What are the structural elements environmental writers can bring to storytelling? How do environmental writers handle or tell stories that support political stances? What stories are out there that can foster a better understanding of our environmental crisis?
Kerri Arsenault (panel moderator) is a freelance book critic, book editor at Orion Magazine, and a contributing editor at The Literary Hub. Her work has appeared in the Boston Globe, Air Mail, Freeman’s, The Paris Review, and the New York Review of Books Daily. Awards include a grant from the Architectural League of NYC, which commissioned ten editorial teams to prepare reports on small to mid-size communities from across the United States and to consider economics; mobility; legacies of environmental, racial, class, and spatial injustice; politics; and the impacts of climate change. Kerri is a mentor for PEN America’s Prison and Justice Writing Program and author of Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains.
Meehan Crist is writer-in-residence in Biological Sciences at Columbia University. Previously she was editor-at-large at Nautilus and reviews editor at The Believer. Her work has appeared in publications such as the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the London Review of Books, the New Republic, The Nation, Tin House, Nautilus, Scientific American, and Science. Awards include the 2015 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award and fellowships from MacDowell, The Blue Mountain Center, Ucross, and Yaddo. She is a founding member of NeuWrite and the host of Convergence: a show about the future.
Bathsheba Demuth is an Assistant Professor of History and Environment and Society at Brown University. An environmental historian, she specializes in the lands and seas of the Russian and North American Arctic. Her interest in northern environments and cultures began when she was 18 and moved to the village of Old Crow in the Yukon. For over two years, she mushed huskies, hunted caribou, fished for salmon, and otherwise learned to survive in the taiga and tundra. Her first book, Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait (W.W. Norton) was named a Nature Top Ten Book of 2019 and Best Book of 2019 by NPR, Barnes and Noble, Kirkus Reviews, and Library Journal among others, and was winner of the 2020 George Perkins Marsh Prize and is a finalist for the Pushkin Prize. A 2020 Andrew Carnegie Fellow, Demuth is starting work on her second book, a biography of the Yukon River watershed from colonization to climate change. From the archive to the dog sled, she is interested in how the histories of people, ideas, places, and other-than-human species intersect. Her writing on these subjects has appeared in publications from The American Historical Review to The New Yorker.
John Freeman is the editor of Freeman’s, a literary annual published in six countries around the world. He has written several books of nonfiction including, How to Read a Novelist and Dictionary of the Undoing, as well as two collections of poems, Maps and The Park, both published by Copper Canyon. The former editor of Granta, he is now Artist-in-Residence at NYU and executive editor of The Literary Hub. Between 2014 and 2020, he edited a trilogy of anthologies on inequality, concluding with Tales of Two Planets, which focuses on the collision of the climate crisis and global inequality. Freeman's work has been translated into more than 20 languages and appears in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Zyzzyva. He lives in London.
Emily Raboteau is an essayist, critic, memoirist and novelist whose work has been published in such places as The New York Review of Books, New York Magazine, The New Yorker, The Guardian, Virginia Quarterly Review, The New York Times, Freeman's and Orion, where she serves as a contributing editor. Her books are The Professor's Daughter, and Searching for Zion: The Quest for Home in the African Diaspora, finalist for the Hurston/Wright Award, and winner of a 2014 American Book Award. Her next book, Caution: Lessons in Survival, is forthcoming from Henry Holt. Her essays on race, place, identity, and the environment have been anthologized in Best African American Essays, Best American Nonrequired Reading and Best American Travel Writing. She is the 2020-2021 Stuart Z. Katz Professor of Humanities and Arts at the City College of New York, CUNY. Since the release of the 2018 IPCC report, she has been writing exclusively about the climate crisis.
Meera Submaranian is an award-winning independent journalist whose work has been published in Nature, Virginia Quarterly Review, The New York Times, The NewYorker.com, InsideClimate News, and Orion, where she serves as a contributing editor. Her work has explored the disappearance of India’s vultures, questioned the “Good Anthropocene,” sought out fragile shorelines, and investigated perceptions of climate change among conservative Americans. Her book A River Runs Again: India's Natural World in Crisis, from the Barren Cliffs of Rajasthan to the Farmlands of Karnataka, which was a 2016 Orion Book Award finalist, tells the stories of ordinary people and micro-enterprises who are determined to guide India into a sustainable future. Her essays have been anthologized in Best American Science and Nature Writing, as well as multiple editions of The Best Women’s Travel Writing. Sometimes she loiters around academica: Princeton University’s Barron Visiting Professor in the Environment and the Humanities (2019-2020), MIT Knight Science Journalism fellow (2016-17), and Fulbright-Nehru Senior Research Fellow (2013-14). She is currently serving as the president of the Society of Environmental Journalists.
