A Program in Partnership with the Thoreau Society
Author talks and writing workshops that encourage critical thinking and perceptive writing about the world and ourselves.
Spring 2023re A
Beloved Beasts: Author Michelle Nijhuis in conversation with Daegan Miller
March 16, 2023
7pm
Free Zoom Event, registration required
Winner of the Sierra Club’s 2021 Rachel Carson Award // One of the Chicago Tribune’s 10 Best Books of 2021 // One of Smithsonian Magazine’s 10 Best Science Books of 2021 // One of Booklist’s 10 Best Sci-Tech Books of 2021 // One of The Marginalian’s Favorite Books of 2021
In the late nineteenth century, as humans came to realize that our rapidly industrializing and globalizing societies were driving other animal species to extinction, a movement to protect and conserve them was born. In Beloved Beasts, acclaimed science writer and editor Michelle Nijhuis traces the movement’s history: from early battles to save charismatic species to today’s global effort to defend life on a larger scale.
Michelle Nijhuis is a project editor at The Atlantic, a longtime contributing editor of High Country News and a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. After 15 years living off the electrical grid in rural Colorado, she and her family now live in White Salmon, Washington.
Daegan Miller is a critic and essayist. He writes about landscape, about how we make a place for ourselves in the world, and about how we make sense of that place-making. He is the author of This Radical Land: A Natural History of American Dissent, which Robert Macfarlane chose as a Best Book of the Year for The Guardian. His essays and reviews have appeared in Emergence, Slate, Literary Hub, Guernica, The North American Review, and many other places. He lives in the hilltowns of Western Massachusetts with his family.
People & the Planet: Authors Yxta Murray & Daniel Selmi Discuss Their New Books
April 20, 2023
7pm
Free Zoom Event, registration required
Just in time for Earth Day, take an evening to consider the role of humans in creating and combating climate change and environmental disaster. Yzta Murray’s God Went Like That is a novel that explores the costs of governmental malfeasance and environmental racism. Daniel Selmi’s Dawn at Mineral King Valley: The Sierra Club, the Disney Company, and the Rise of Environmental Law is a history of a legal showdown that launched a new environmental era in America. Yxta and Daniel discuss their books and the lessons they can provide.
Yxta Maya Murray is a novelist, art critic, playwright, and law professor. Her most recent books are the story collection The World Doesn’t Work That Way, but It Could, and the novel Art Is Everything. She has won a Whiting Award and an Art Writer’s Grant and has been named a fellow at the Huntington Library for her work on radionuclide contamination in Simi Valley, California.
Daniel P. Selmi is the Fritz B. Burns Chair in Real Property Emeritus at Loyola Law School, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles.