S166. The Greening of Literature: Eco-Fiction and Poetry to Enlighten and Inspire

Aspen Room, Sheraton Seattle, 2nd Floor
Saturday, March 1, 2014
12:00 pm to 1:15 pm

 

From mountaintop removal to ocean plastic to endangered species, ecological issues are increasingly on writers’ minds. Authors on this panel discuss how their ecologically themed fiction and poetry engages readers in powerful ways that nonfiction can’t. Panelists discuss writing in these emerging sub-genres as well as their readers’ responses and offer tips for writing about the environment in ways that are galvanizing and instructive without sacrificing creativity to polemics.


Participants

Moderator:

John Yunker is the author of the award-winning eco-thriller The Tourist Trail and he is co-founder of Ashland Creek Press, a boutique publisher devoted to environmental literature.

JoeAnn Hart is author of the novels Addled and Float, a work of eco-fiction about plastics in the ocean, excerpts of which have won the Doug Fir Fiction Award and have been published in environmental journals. A graduate of the Bennington MFA program, she is on the board of the Gloucester Writers Center.

Mindy Mejia is the author of the novel The Dragon Keeper. She has a MFA from Hamline University. Her short stories have appeared in DimeStories, THIS literary magazine, and elsewhere.

Ann Pancake is author of the novel Strange As This Weather Has Been and the story collection Given Ground. Her awards include a Whiting Award, an NEA grant, and a Bakeless Prize, and her work has appeared in Orion, among other journals. She teaches at Pacific Lutheran University.

Gretchen Primack is the author of two poetry collections, Kind and Doris' Red Spaces, and a chapbook, and she is the co-author of the memoir of Jenny Brown, The Lucky Ones: My Passionate Fight for Farm Animals.

#AWP24

February 7–10, 2024
Kansas City, Missouri

Kansas City Convention Center