climate science + literary arts
CONTRIBUTORS Cc 1
Timo Aho investigates our relationship to our surroundings within today's rapidly developing technological society and complex institutional structures. Through his work, Aho seeks to explore concepts and ideas within an unstable media-saturated world. Aho’s multifaceted practice spans sculpture, intervention and installation, often combining light, modern low technology, traditional sculpture and ordinary materials. Aho has exhibited in group and solo exhibitions and presented public artworks in the UK and Finland. He has created installations and interventions in Norway, Denmark, The Netherlands and in the Venice Architecture Biennale, Scottish Pavilion's HappenStance -18. Aho lives and works in Helsinki.
Jon Barnett is Professor and Australian Research Council Future Fellow in the School of Geography at Melbourne University. He is a political geographer who researches the impacts of and responses to environmental change on social systems in Australia, East Asia and the South Pacific. Jon is a Lead Author for the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Working Group II, Ch 12), and he is co-editor of Global Environmental Change.
Alison Hawthorne Deming is the author of five books of poetry and five of nonfiction. This essay is from her forthcoming Lament for the Makers, which was her Guggenheim Fellowship project. She is Regents Professor in Creative Writing and Agnese Nelms Haury Chair in Environment and Social Justice at the University of Arizona.
Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta and grew up in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. He studied in Delhi, Oxford and Alexandria and is the author of The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, In An Antique Land, Dancing in Cambodia, The Calcutta Chromosome, The Glass Palace, The Hungry Tide, and The Ibis Trilogy, consisting of Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke and Flood of Fire. His most recent book, The Great Derangement; Climate Change and the Unthinkable, a work of non-fiction, appeared in 2016. The Circle of Reason was awarded France’s Prix Médicis in 1990, and The Shadow Lines won two prestigious Indian prizes the same year, the Sahitya Akademi Award and the Ananda Puraskar. The Calcutta Chromosome won the Arthur C. Clarke award for 1997 and The Glass Palace won the International e-Book Award at the Frankfurt book fair in 2001. In January 2005 The Hungry Tide was awarded the Crossword Book Prize, a major Indian award. His novel, Sea of Poppies (2008) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, 2008 and was awarded the Crossword Book Prize and the India Plaza Golden Quill Award. His next book, Gun Island, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in September 2019.
Abeer Y. Hoque is a Nigerian born Bangladeshi American writer and photographer. She has published a book of travel photographs and poems called The Long Way Home (Ogro Dhaka 2013), and a book of linked stories, photographs and poems called The Lovers and the Leavers (Bengal Lights Books 2014, HarperCollins Publishers India 2015). She is a Fulbright Scholar and has received several other fellowships and grants. Her writing and photography have been published in Guernica, Outlook Traveller, Elle, Wasafiri, ZYZZYVA, India Today, Catapult, Vogue India, and The Daily Star. She has degrees from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business and an MFA in writing from the University of San Francisco. For more information, visit olivewitch.com
Edgar Hinge (kastom name, Mata Sangvulu) is from northern Pentecost Island, Vanuatu. He is a museum guide at the National Museum of Vanuatu. He teaches sandroing in primary classrooms at the Vanuatu Kastom School in Port Vila through the Friends of Vanuatu Museum.
Farhad Khoyratty is Associate Professor [Ph.D] in Cultural Studies, teaching especially film and phenomenology, and founder/coordinator of the Research Group for IndianOceanic Studies in the Humanities (REGIOSH) and of the Comparative Literature Research Group, at the University of Mauritius. He is a member of various research projects: in Barcelona (Spain), of which two concern creative writing as therapy against trauma; and in South Africa, one of which is the Mellon funded Oceanic Humanities for the Global South. His creative writing has won him Mauritian and international prizes, notably the first HSBC/SA PEN Award, as selected by J.M. Coetzee. He has been, since 2005, an invited member of South African PEN. Over three years, he served as Vice-President of the Mauritian Writers Association. In 2010, he was made writer-in-residence first by the US State Department at the University of Iowa, then by the Island Institute, Alaska. He was made an Honorary Fellow in Writing of the University of Iowa. A Fellow of the Cambridge Commonwealth Society, he was formerly Junior Research Fellow of Hughes Hall, Cambridge. He was made twice a British Chevening Fellow, and Fellow of the English Speaking Union. Further, he has given Keynotes at two international conferences. His writing has appeared in various anthologies, including Farafina (Nigeria), the Caine Prize for African Writing, and Connotations (Alaska) and has edited/prefaced/launched works by Mauritian writers Lindsey Collen, Joseph Tsang Mang Kin and Shakuntala Hawoldar A former rower for his Cambridge University college, he speaks about a dozen languages and has lived in/visited many countries.
Bridget Lyons lives two blocks from the water in Santa Cruz, CA, where she watches the coastline change every day. She works as a writer and editor and is currently finishing up a book examining human and non-human migratory lifestyles in light of our planet's increasing instability.
Eric Magrane is an assistant professor of geography at New Mexico State University. He is the editor, with Christopher Cokinos, of The Sonoran Desert: A Literary Field Guide (University of Arizona Press), and with Linda Russo, Craig Santos Perez, and Sarah de Leeuw, of Geopoetics in Practice (forthcoming from Routledge). Recent work also appears in Ecotone, Literary Geographies, GeoHumanities, and in the books Counter-desecration: A glossary for writing within the Anthropocene (Wesleyan), Big energy poets: When ecopoets think climate change (BlazeVOX), and elsewhere.
Andrew Mobbs is a native Arkansan based in Flagstaff, AZ. In 2013, he released his poetry chapbook, Strangers and Pilgrims (Six Gallery Press) and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize the following year. His work has appeared in Bayou Magazine, Frontier Poetry, Poetry Quarterly, Southwestern American Literature, and elsewhere. He also co-edits the online literary journal Nude Bruce Review.
Kathleen Dean Moore is a writer, mora philosopher, and environmental thought-leader, devoting to an unrelenting defense of the future against those who would pillage and wreck the planet. As a writer, Kathleen is best known for award-winning books of essays that celebrate and explore the meaning of the wet, wild world of rivers, islands, and tidal shores—Riverwalking,
Holdfast, Pine Island Paradox, and Wild Comfort.
Civil engineer Olaf Müller is director of the Department of Waterways and Flood Protection in the city-state of Hamburg's Ministry for Streets, Bridges, and Waterways.
Pekka Niittyvirta's (b. 1974, Helsinki) work is often dealing with consequences of human actions, weather they are related with the society, technology, environment or the financial market. He mostly uses photography and video as a material in various ways to depict a situation or phenomena. Niittyvirta’s works do not necessarily rely on traditional imaging processes alone. Incorporating various digital, biological and chemical processes, they address such issues as the problems of technology and information society. Niittyvirta lives and works in Helsinki. In addition to his hometown he works with projects in various locations, ranging from Swedish Lapland to Eastern Africa and Mongolia. Niittyvirta has exhibited his work since 1999 in Finland and internationally in both solo and group shows.
Craig Santos Perez is an indigenous Chamorro poet from the Pacific Island of Guam. He is the author of four collections of poetry and the co-editor of five anthologies. He is an associate professor in the English department at the University of Hawaiʻi, Mānoa.
Mahmud Rahman is a writer and translator, originally from Bangladesh, now resident in California. His fiction, nonfiction, and translations have been published in such magazines and anthologies as Papercuts, Oakland Noir, Brooklyn Magazine, Scroll India, Dhaka Tribune, Words Without Borders, Himal Southasian, World Literature Today, and Wasafir. His first book, Killing the Water: Stories, was published in 2010 by Penguin Books India and includes stories of migrants and dislocated people, in Bengal, Boston, Detroit, Providence, and imagined territories. His second book, a translation of Bangladeshi writer Mahmudul Haque’s Partition-centered novel Black Ice, was published in 2012 by HarperCollins India. He has completed a novel The Fiction Factory, set in contemporary Bangladesh and centered around themes of ‘fake news’ and police murders. For more on Mahmud’s writing, visit www.mahmudrahman.com.
Mary Rokonadravu is a Fijian writer. She ran a prison writing programme in seven correctional facilities in Fiji’s capital, Suva, for four years, and edited the Pacific’s first anthology of prison writing, shedding silences, in 2008. She won the 2015 Regional Commonwealth Short Story Prize (Pacific) and was shortlisted in 2017. Her dream is to contribute to the growth of a vibrant Pacific islands writing and publishing sector – and to Pacific islanders reading and valuing their own stories and voices.
Mathew Sanders is a globally-recognized leader in climate resilience and adaptation planning, post-disaster recovery planning, community development, and large-scale outreach and public engagement. He has extensive experience leading large-scale and high-profile inter-governmental and consultant-staffed special project teams. He currently leads the development and implementation of two programs, Louisiana’s Strategic Adaptations for Future Environments (LA SAFE) and the Resettlement of Isle de Jean Charles.
Tim Yamamura is a multi-disciplinary scholar, writer, and cultural producer. Tim taught American, post-colonial, transnational, and world literatures as faculty member at Northern Arizona University and is the first faculty member in NAU’s English department to teach classes on Asian American and Pacific Islander literature. A member of the Ethnic Studies Steering Committee since 2017, Tim's research interests include transnational Asian American literary studies, post-colonialism in Asia/Pacific, science fiction studies, and critical race, ethnic, diaspora, and cultural studies. Born in San Francisco, Tim completed his Doctor of Philosophy in Literature at UC Santa Cruz, where he wrote a UC Pacific Rim Dissertation Research Award-winning dissertation, "Science Fiction Futures and the Ocean as History: Literature, Diaspora, and the Pacific War.” Tim’s work as a writer, translator, and editor has been published by the University Press of Colorado, the University Press of Mississippi, Standford’s Hoover Institute, the Asian Theatre Journal, the U.S.-Japan’s Women’s Journal.