How does language shape our relationship with the land? What is literature's role in the future of our planet?
Join Literary Cleveland and Orion Magazine for "Stories of The Land: How Literature Confronts a Climate Crisis," a discussion with local writers about how fiction, nonfiction, and poetry can shift cultural perception about the environment, reconsider our relationship to nature, and galvanize us to address the climate crisis.
Deborah Fleming’s nonfiction collection Resurrection of the Wild: Meditations on Ohio’s Natural Landscape won the 2020 PEN-America Art of the Essay Award. Her second collection, Ghosts of an Old Forest: Essays on Midwestern Rural Heritage, will be out in April 2025. She has published five books of poems, a novel, and four volumes of scholarship. Winner of a Vandewater Poetry Award and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, she served for many years as director and editor of the Ashland Poetry Press.
Alison Stine is the author of the novel Trashlands (MIRA/HarperCollins), long-listed for the 2022 Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award, and Road Out of Winter which won the Philip K. Dick Award. Also the author of three poetry collections published on university presses and a novella, Alison’s original musicals and plays have been produced at community and regional theaters, and Off-Broadway. Recipient of a Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and a grant from the Ohio Arts Council, Alison was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and a Ruth Lilly Fellow. The former Staff Culture Writer at Salon, Alison has been a freelance reporter for the New York Times. Her journalism has also appeared in the Washington Post, the Atlantic, 100 Days in Appalachia, and more. Her creative writing has been published in the Kenyon Review, the Paris Review, Vogue, VQR, Poetry, and others. Alison holds a PhD from Ohio University and lives with her son in Ohio. Her third novel Dust was published by Wednesday Books (Macmillan/St. Martin’s Press) in December of 2024, and received the Gold Standard Selection from the Junior Library Guild.
Jon Wlasiuk was born in the Black Swamp region of northwest Ohio and earned a PhD in environmental history from Case Western Reserve University. Jon is an Assistant Professor at Michigan State University and lives in Cleveland’s Slavic Village neighborhood. He is the author of Refining Nature: Standard Oil and the Limits of Efficiency. Pittsburgh (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017) and An Alternative History of Cleveland (Belt Publishing, 2024).
Presented as part of Climate and Health Month in Cuyahoga County.
Books will be available for purchase from Mac’s Backs. Free. Registration required.
How does language shape our relationship with the land? What is literature's role in the future of our planet?
Join Literary Cleveland and Orion Magazine for "Stories of The Land: How Literature Confronts a Climate Crisis," a discussion with local writers about how fiction, nonfiction, and poetry can shift cultural perception about the environment, reconsider our relationship to nature, and galvanize us to address the climate crisis.
Deborah Fleming’s nonfiction collection Resurrection of the Wild: Meditations on Ohio’s Natural Landscape won the 2020 PEN-America Art of the Essay Award. Her second collection, Ghosts of an Old Forest: Essays on Midwestern Rural Heritage, will be out in April 2025. She has published five books of poems, a novel, and four volumes of scholarship. Winner of a Vandewater Poetry Award and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, she served for many years as director and editor of the Ashland Poetry Press.
Alison Stine is the author of the novel Trashlands (MIRA/HarperCollins), long-listed for the 2022 Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award, and Road Out of Winter which won the Philip K. Dick Award. Also the author of three poetry collections published on university presses and a novella, Alison’s original musicals and plays have been produced at community and regional theaters, and Off-Broadway. Recipient of a Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and a grant from the Ohio Arts Council, Alison was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and a Ruth Lilly Fellow. The former Staff Culture Writer at Salon, Alison has been a freelance reporter for the New York Times. Her journalism has also appeared in the Washington Post, the Atlantic, 100 Days in Appalachia, and more. Her creative writing has been published in the Kenyon Review, the Paris Review, Vogue, VQR, Poetry, and others. Alison holds a PhD from Ohio University and lives with her son in Ohio. Her third novel Dust was published by Wednesday Books (Macmillan/St. Martin’s Press) in December of 2024, and received the Gold Standard Selection from the Junior Library Guild.
Jon Wlasiuk was born in the Black Swamp region of northwest Ohio and earned a PhD in environmental history from Case Western Reserve University. Jon is an Assistant Professor at Michigan State University and lives in Cleveland’s Slavic Village neighborhood. He is the author of Refining Nature: Standard Oil and the Limits of Efficiency. Pittsburgh (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017) and An Alternative History of Cleveland (Belt Publishing, 2024).
Presented as part of Climate and Health Month in Cuyahoga County.
Books will be available for purchase from Mac’s Backs. Free. Registration required.
Deborah Fleming’s nonfiction collection Resurrection of the Wild: Meditations onOhio’s Natural Landscape won the 2020 PEN-America Art of the Essay Award. Her second collection, Ghosts of an Old Forest: Essays on Midwestern Rural Heritage, will be out in April 2025. She has published five books of poems, a novel, and four volumes of scholarship, and she served for many years as director and editor of the Ashland Poetry Press.
Alison Stine is the author of the novels Trashlands, Road Out of Winter, and Dust (St. Martin’s Press, 2024). Her journalism has also appeared in the Washington Post, the Atlantic, 100 Days in Appalachia, and more. Her creative writing has been published in the Kenyon Review, the Paris Review, Vogue, VQR, Poetry, and others. Alison holds a PhD from Ohio University and lives with her son in Ohio.
Jon Wlasiuk was born in the Black Swamp region of northwest Ohio and earned a PhD in environmental history from Case Western Reserve University. He is Assistant Professor at Michigan State University and lives in Cleveland’s Slavic Village neighborhood. He is the author of Refining Nature: Standard Oil and the Limits of Efficiency. Pittsburgh (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017) and An Alternative History of Cleveland (Belt Publishing, 2024).
