Maine Lit Fest Event - Day 9
How do today’s environmental writers create a balance between awe and terror, wonder and concern? Between narrating and describing and spurring readers to reflect, act, advocate, and change? On this panel, we’ll hear from authors whose work addresses environmental justice, the climate crisis, and the precarious relationship between humans and the planet.
Featured authors include Samaa Abdurraqib (Each Day Is Like an Anchor and editor of From Root to Seed: Black, Brown, and Indigenous Writers Write the Northeast), Jason Anthony (Hoosh and the newsletter A Field Guide to the Anthropocene), Gregory Brown (The Lowering Days), and Jennifer Lunden (American Breakdown: Notes from an Industrialized Body, forthcoming from Harper Wave). Kathryn Miles (Trailed) will facilitate.
This event is free.
Books will be sold by Print: A Bookstore.
Samaa Abdurraqib is the Executive Director of Maine Humanities Council. She lives in Portland with her cat, Stashiell Hammett, Resident Charmer & Most Attractive Feline In The World. She enjoys birding, hiking and being outdoors, and coaching leaders of color. She is an Outdoor Afro leader in Portland, Maine, and has been connecting with Black people in the outdoors for over three years. Samaa also loves writing and has recently returned to writing poetry and creative non-fiction after a 15 year hiatus. She’s recently published her first chapbook, Each Day Is Like an Anchor (2020).
Jason Anthony was born in Maine in 1967, attended school and Clark University in Massachusetts, and earned his MA in poetry from the University of New Hampshire. Soon thereafter, he fled the warm world for Antarctica, where he worked in the United States Antarctic Program for eight austral summers as a Waste Management Specialist, Fuels Operator, Cargo Handler, Skiway Groomer, and Camp Supervisor. Anthony filled his Antarctic notebooks with the raw material for lyric essays, essays, and articles, some twenty three of which have been published since he last left the ice in 2004. His work has been featured in several publications, including Orion, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Missouri Review, and The Smart Set. One Antarctic essay was selected for The Best American Travel Writing 2007, and another was a Notable Essay in The Best American Essays 2006.
Anthony's essay "Hoosh," published in the literary food journal Alimentum, inspired his first book, Hoosh: Roast Penguin, Scurvy Day, and Other Stories of Antarctic Cuisine (University of Nebraska Press). Hoosh, a narrative and culinary history of Antarctica, won a 2012 Andre Simon Food and Drink Book Award, a 2012 ForeWord Book of the Year Award (Travel), a Silver Medal in the 2013 Independent Publisher Book Awards (Creative Nonfiction), and was a finalist for a 2013 Maine Literary Award (Nonfiction). The New York Times Book Review called Anthony “a fine, visceral writer and a witty observer," and The Independent (UK) described Hoosh as "one of the most enthralling studies of gastronomy ever published."
Anthony is the 2014 Literary Fellow for Maine, thanks to a fellowship from the Maine Arts Commission. He lives in midcoast Maine with his wife, the singer-songwriter Heather Hardy.
Gregory Brown grew up along Penobscot Bay and still lives in Maine with his family. His work often explores the interaction of land and human influence, with a particular interest on social, cultural, and environmental issues in rural communities.
His short fiction has appeared in Tin House, The Alaska Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, Epoch, and Narrative Magazine, where he was a winner of the 30Below Prize. His non- fiction writing has appeared in the New York Times, American Short Fiction, The Chicago Tribune, Lit Hub, and The Millions. A graduate of Columbia University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he is the recipient of scholarships and fellowships from MacDowell, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference.
His debut novel, The Lowering Days, was a Publishers Marketplace 2021 Buzz Book, a Goodreads best debut novel, a Library Journal best debut novel, longlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, and won an AudioFile Magazine Earphones award.
Jennifer Lunden is the author of American Breakdown: Notes from an Industrialized Body, forthcoming from Harper Wave in 2023. A chapter from the book—which blends memoir, history, science and social criticism to explore the health hazards of industrial capitalism—was a Maine Literary Awards finalist, and her essay, “Evidence,” also a finalist, received a notable mention in Best American Essays. In 2020 her essay “Fugitive Justice” was the winner of the Maine Literary Awards short works competition in nonfiction.
Lunden’s creative nonfiction has been published in Longreads, Orion, River Teeth, Creative Nonfiction, and DIAGRAM; her fiction in Eclectica, and Wigleaf; and poems in Sweet Lit, Peacock Journal, The Café Review, and other journals. In May 2015, accompanied by a circle of six dancers, she performed an original poem with Esduardo Mariscal Dance Theater, and in February 2020 Maine poet laureate Stuart Kestenbaum read her poem “In February” on Maine Public Radio’s Poems from Here.
Her work has been anthologized in True Stories, Well Told: From The First 20 Years Of Creative Nonfiction Magazine, Environmental and Nature Writing: A Writer’s Guide And Anthology, and The Pushcart Prize XXXVII: Best of the Small Presses. Her paper about the intersection of industrial capitalism and health as viewed through the lens of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper” was selected for the scholarly collection Charlotte Perkins Gilman: New Texts, New Contexts.
The winner of the 2019 Maine Arts Fellowship for literary arts, Lunden is the recipient of two Canada Council for the Arts grants, a Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund grant, a Bread Loaf-Rona Jaffe Foundation Scholarship in Nonfiction, and fellowships from Monson Arts, Hewnoaks Artist Colony, Hedgebrook, Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Dora Maar House in France.
She and her husband, the artist Frank Turek, live in a little house on the Portland peninsula, where they keep four chickens, two cats, and one Great Dane.
Kathryn Miles is an award-winning journalist and science writer. She received a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy from Saint Louis University and took both her Master of Arts and Doctorate in English from the University of Delaware. The long-time editor of Hawk & Handsaw, Miles served as professor of environmental studies and writing at Unity College from 2001-2015 and has since taught in several graduate schools and low residency-MFA programs including, most recently, at Green Mountain College, where she was also writer-in-residence. Miles is the author of five books: Adventures with Ari, All Standing, Superstorm, Quakeland, and Trailed: One Woman’s Quest to Solve the Shenandoah Murders. Her essays and articles have appeared in publications including Audubon, Best American Essays, The Boston Globe, Down East, Ecotone, History, The New York Times, Outside, Pacific Standard, Politico, Popular Mechanics, and Time. She currently serves as a scholar-in-residence for the Maine Humanities Council, a faculty member for several MFA programs, and as a private consultant available for emerging and established writers. She lives in Portland, Maine.