Terrain.org Reading Series: Sandra Steingraber, Taylor Brorby + Tamie Parker Song
Join us for Terrain.org’s fifth reading in our online Terrain.org Reading Series.
Moderated by Elizabeth Dodd and underwritten by the Michael Donnelly Faculty Award at Kansas State University, with Zoom hosting provided by the University of Arizona, this reading and discussion features acclaimed essayists and environmental activists Sandra Steingraber, Taylor Brorby, and Tamie Parker Song.
Biologist, author, and cancer survivor, Sandra Steingraber, Ph.D. writes about climate change, ecology, and the links between human health and the environment. Her highly acclaimed book, Living Downstream: An Ecologist’s Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment was the first to bring together data on toxic releases with data from U.S. cancer registries and was adapted for the screen in 2010. As both book and documentary film, Living Downstream has won praise from international media. Continuing the investigation begun in Living Downstream, Steingraber’s books, Having Faith: An Ecologist’s Journey to Motherhood and Raising Elijah: Protecting Our Children in an Age of Environmental Crisis, explore the intimate ecology of pregnancy and reveal the ways which environmental hazards now threaten each stage of infant and child development. Throughout, she calls parents and cancer patients alike to political action. Sandra has been named a Woman of the Year by Ms. Magazine, a Person of the Year by Treehugger, and one of 25 “Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World” by the Utne Reader. She is the recipient of the biennial Rachel Carson Leadership Award and the Jenifer Altman Foundation’s Altman Award for “the inspiring and poetic use of science to elucidate the causes of cancer.” Steingraber received a Hero Award from the Breast Cancer Fund and the Environmental Health Champion Award from Physicians for Social Responsibility, Los Angeles. Read work by and an interview with Sandra Steingraber appearing in Terrain.org.
Taylor Brorby is the author of Crude: Poems, 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, Blue Mountain Center, and the North Dakota Humanities Council. Taylor’s work has appeared in The Huffington Post, Orion Magazine, 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 currently teaches environmental studies at Wofford College. His next book, Boys and Oil, is under contract with Liveright/W.W. Norton. Read Taylor Brorby’s Letter to America appearing in Terrain.org.
Tamie Parker Song is an essayist, walker, and therapist living in New York City whose heart is in every kind of wilderness. She has been supported by fellowships at MacDowell and The Island Institute in Sitka, Alaska, and has been published by Baltimore Review, New Ohio Review, Selkie Zine, and Cirque Journal, and shortlisted in Best American Essays 2016. Her MFA is from the University of Southern Maine. Tamie’s essay “The Fifth Direction” won Terrain.org’s inaugural Editor’s Prize in Nonfiction.
