Sandra Steingraber and Taylor Brorby in Conversation: Boys and Oil, Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land
Join us online for a conversation between acclaimed environmental writers and activists Sandra Steingraber and Taylor Brorby.
In this event, noted environmental author and activist Sandra Steingraber is in conversation with Taylor Brorby about his debut memoir, Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land.
This online conversation is Monday, June 27, at 5 p.m. PT / 6 MT / 7 CE / 8 ET.
This conversation is sponsored by Terrain.org, with Zoom hosting provided by the University of Arizona.
“I am a child of the American West, a landscape so rich and wide that my culture trembles with terror before its power.” So begins Taylor Brorby’s Boys and Oil, a haunting, bracingly honest memoir about growing up gay amidst the harshness of rural North Dakota, “a place where there is no safety in a ravaged landscape of mining and fracking.”
In visceral prose, Brorby recounts his upbringing in the coalfields, his adolescent infatuation with books, and how he felt intrinsically different from other boys. Now an environmentalist, Brorby uses the destruction of large swathes of the West as a metaphor for the terror he experienced as a youth. From an assault outside a bar in an oil boom town to a furtive romance, and from his awakening as an activist to his arrest at the Dakota Access Pipeline, Boys and Oil provides a startling portrait of an America that persists despite well-intentioned legal protections.
Sandra Steingraber, Ph.D. is a biologist, poet, and author of a trilogy of books on environmental health. She currently serves as a senior scientist at the Science and Environmental Health Network and recently edited two volumes of Rachel Carson’s writings for Library of America. She also writes for Orion and Terrain.org magazines.
Taylor Brorby is the author of Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land, Crude: Poems, and Coming Alive: Action and Civil Disobedience, and co-editor of Fracture: Essays, Poems, and Stories on Fracking in America. His work has been supported by grants and fellowships from the National Book Critics Circle, the MacDowell Colony, the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, Mesa Refuge, and Blue Mountain Center. Taylor’s work has appeared in The Huffington Post, Orion, The Arkansas International, Southern Humanities Review, North Dakota Quarterly, and has appeared in numerous anthologies. He is a contributing editor at North American Review and serves on the editorial boards of Terrain.org and Hub City Press. Taylor regularly speaks around the country on issues related to extractive economies, queerness, disability, and climate change. He is the Annie Tanner Clark Fellow in Environmental Humanities and Environmental Justice at the Tanner Humanities Center at the University of Utah.
