S276. Rounding the Human Corners: Writing the Truth about the Changing World

Room 613/614, Washington State Convention Center, Level 6
Saturday, March 1, 2014
4:30 pm to 5:45 pm

 

Straddling mass extinctions and shifting ecosystems, how do we write about the more-than-human in a way that avoids simple metaphor? And how do we write of degradation and extinction in language that engages the (human) reader and remains truthful to these “other nations?” Discussing a diversity of approaches are five authors of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction about horses, wolves, birch trees, killer whales, polar bears—the depth and range of the world just beyond our human skin.


Participants

Moderator:

Marybeth Holleman is author of The Heart of the Sound, co-author of Among Wolves, and co-editor of Crosscurrents North. Pushcart-prize nominee, her essays, poems, and articles have appeared in such venues as Orion, Christian Science Monitor, The Future of Nature, and on National Public Radio.

Linda Hogan is the author of sixteen books of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and performance, including People of the Whale, a novel; The Woman Who Watches Over the World, a memoir; and Indios, a poetry/performance text. She has received a Lannan Literary Award, and NEA and Guggenheim fellowships.

Ann Fisher-Wirth is the author of four books of poems, most recently Dream Cabinet and Carta Marina, and coeditor of the newly published, groundbreaking Ecopoetry Anthology. She has had senior Fulbrights to Switzerland and Sweden, and she teaches at the University of Mississippi.

Eva Saulitis, a writer and marine biologist, has studied the killer whales of Prince William Sound, Alaska for twenty-five years. She is the author of a book of essays Leaving Resurrection: Chronicles of a Whale Scientist, the poetry collection Many Ways to Say It, and Into Great Silence: A Memoir of Discovery and Loss among Vanishing Orcas. A recipient of fellowships from the Rasmuson Foundation and the Alaska State Council on the Arts, she is an associate professor in the University of Alaska Low-Residency MFA program.

Juan Carlos Galeano is professor in the department of Modern Languages and Linguistics at Florida State University. He is the author of Baraja Inicial (1986), Pollen and Rifles (1997), Amazonia (2003), Sobre las cosas (2010), and Yakumama and other Mythical Beings (2011).

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