On America: Writing and Reading the Environment

Panelists

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  Kerri Arsenault

  Kerri Arsenault

  Kerri Arsenault is a freelance book critic, book editor at Orion magazine, and a contributing editor at Lit Hub. Her work has appeared in the Boston Globe, Lit Hub, Air Mail, Freeman’s, and the Minneapolis Star Tribune. 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 Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains, is her first book.

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  Meehan Crist

  Meehan Crist

  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.

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  Bathsheba Demuth

  Bathsheba Demuth

  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.

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  John Freeman

  John Freeman

  John Freeman is the editor of Freeman’s, a literary annual of new writing. His books include How to Read a Novelist and The Tyranny of E-mail, as well as Tales of Two Americas, an anthology of new writing about inequality in the U.S. today. Maps, his debut collection of poems, was published in 2017, and The Park, his second book of poems, was published in 2020. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages and has appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, and the New York Times. The former editor of Granta and one-time president of the National Book Critics Circle, he is currently Artist-in-Residence at New York University.

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  Emily Raboteau

  Emily Raboteau

  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 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.

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  Meera Subramanian

  Meera Subramanian

  Meera Subramanian is an award-winning independent journalist whose work has been published in Nature, Virginia Quarterly Review, the New York Times, NewYorker.com, Inside Climate 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 academia: 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. Based in Cape Cod, you can find her at www.meerasub.org and @meeratweets.