Nature Writing as a Subversive Activity with Barbara Hurd

This combination talk and reading will explore the increasingly urgent challenge of writing about the natural world in a time of rapid climate change. We’ll explore how such writing can challenge Western notions of community, narrative, context, and scale, attitudes toward “the other,” and the role of uncertainties. Hurd will also do a short reading from her latest book The Epilogues and discuss the evolution of this hybrid collection.

Barbara Hurd is the author of The Epilogues (Standing Stone Books 2021), Listening to the Savage / River Notes and Half-Heard Melodies (University of Georgia Press 2016), Tidal Rhythms (with photographer Stephen Strom, George F. Thompson Publishing 2016), Walking the Wrack Line (University of Georgia Press 2008), Entering the Stone, a Library Journal Best Natural History Book of the Year (Houghton Mifflin 2003), and Stirring the Mud, a Los Angeles Times Best Book of 2001 (Beacon Press 2001).

Her work has appeared in numerous journals including LitHub, Bellingham Review, Terrain, Prairie Schooner, Best American Essays, The Yale Review, The Georgia Review, Orion, Audubon, The Sun, and others. The recipient of a 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship for Creative Nonfiction, winner of the Sierra Club’s National Nature Writing Award, three Pushcart Prizes, and five Maryland State Arts Council Awards, she teaches in the MFA in Writing Program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts.