Award-winning place-based writers, educators, and thinkers J. Drew Lanham and Leonora Simonovis have joined Terrain.org—Drew on the editorial board and Leo as our inaugural Currents editor.
Terrain.org is delighted to announce that MacArthur Fellow J. Drew Lanham has joined our editorial board, while Leonora Simonovis becomes Terrain.org’s first Currents editor.
As an editorial board member, Drew will help advise the publication, which recently won the 2023 John Burroughs Nature Essay Award and is a three-time finalist in the most recent AWP Small Press Publisher Award series. Read our 2021 interview with Drew.
As Currents editor, Leo will curate new series and oversee all editorials. Currents is the section for such acclaimed series as Letters to America and A Life of Science. Just this week, her first limited series, The Circumabulation of Mount Tamalpais, begin with a lovely essay by Andrea Ross.
Please join us in welcoming Drew and Leo, and meet all of our editors and editorial board members!
About J. Drew Lanham
J. Drew Lanham, PhD, is an author, poet, public speaker and scientist, from Edgefield and Aiken, South Carolina. He is an Alumni Distinguished Professor and Master Teacher of Wildlife Ecology at Clemson University, whose work addresses the confluence of race, place and nature. Drew is the Poet Laureate of Edgefield County, S.C. and the author of Sparrow Envy: Poems, Sparrow Envy: A Field Guide to Birds and Lesser Beasts, and The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature. His memoir is a past winner of the Reed Environmental Writing Award (Southern Environmental Law Center) and the Southern Book Prize and a 2017 finalist for the John Burroughs Medal. It was named a memoir and scholarly book of the decade (Lithub and Chronicle of Higher Education, respectively).
He has contributed chapters to a number of anthologies, including Carolina Writers at Home, Literary Dogs, Bartram’s Living Legacy, The Colors of Nature, and Outdoor Adventures in the Upcountry. His creative work and opinion appears in Orion, Vanity Fair, Oxford American, High Country News, Bitter Southerner, Cutthroat, Terrain.org, Places Journal, Literary Hub, Newsweek, Slate, NPR, Story Corps, Audubon, Sierra, The New York Times, American Bird Conservancy, Leopold Outlook, and Flycatcher Journal. He teaches writing workshops in creative nonfiction for Bread Loaf Environmental Writer’s Conference, Bemidji Writer’s Conference, Chico Writer’s Conference and Orion. He is a contributing editor for Orion. Drew is a 2022 MacArthur Fellow and the winner of the Dan W. Lufkin Conservation Award (National Audubon Society), Rosa Parks and Grace Lee Boggs Outstanding Service Award (North American Association for Environmental Education), and the E.O. Wilson Award for Outstanding Science in Biodiversity Conservation (Center for Biological Diversity). He is a Fellow of the Clemson Parks Institute and Safina Center and serves as an advisor to Georgia Audubon.
About Leonora Simonovis
Leonora Simonovis is a Venezuelan American poet, educator, and scholar living on the unceded territory of the Kumeyaay Nation (San Diego, California). She holds a Ph.D. in Hispanic Literatures from Washington University in St. Louis and an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University, Los Angeles. Currently, she is a professor of Latin American literature and culture as well as creative writing in Spanish at the University of San Diego, as well as a reviews editor for Ecotheo.
Her poetry manuscript, Study of the Raft, was selected by final judge Sherwin Bitsui as the winner of the 2021 Colorado Prize for Poetry and received Honorable Mention at the 2022 International Latino Book Awards. Her work has appeared in Verse Daily, River Mouth Review, Kweli Journal, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Diode, Inverted Syntax, and Arkansas International, among others. Leonora has received fellowships from VONA, Women Who Submit, and the Poetry Foundation.
