ASLE Book & Paper Awards

Ecocriticism Books

Jessica Hurley (George Mason University), Infrastructures of Apocalypse: American Literature and the Nuclear Complex, University of Minnesota Press, 2020.

Judges’ comments: “Jessica Hurley’s bracing study Infrastructures of Apocalypse examines nuclear representations that, in the author’s words, “defamiliarize the present, estranging us from the everyday world that we inhabit,” which is also a good description of what the book accomplishes. It delivers a bold challenge to doomsday rhetoric. It also deflates the fantasy of a final detonation. According to Hurley, the end is now; we are living it. Hurley exposes a world “saturated with nuclear logics” by shifting attention from the bomb to the present reality of the nuclear apocalypse as it is lived and articulated by various environmental and liberatory justice movements emerging from marginalized communities. Infrastructures of Apocalypse realigns the field of environmental humanities around nuclear narratives and delivers searing accounts of nuclear cultures past and present. It is a one-of-a-kind book that will help folks writing about and teaching a variety of environmental humanities topics.”

Judges comment: “Cajetan Iheka’s African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics foregrounds Africa’s media objects, including “oil, uranium, coltan, and banana,” as the absent presence of contemporary media studies, waste studies, and the energy humanities. The book begins and ends with a piercing analysis of the film Black Panther and discloses the centrality of African ecomedia to the workings of global capitalism, communication technology, and popular culture. Iheka’s book stands out among a growing body of environmental media studies by drawing attention to African art, history, and Black diasporic culture in making network forms—forms, Iheka argues, that are always political and extractive. It is a remarkable book, distinguished by excellent research and writing, that offers a much-needed shift in media studies and environmental criticism.”

Environmental Creative Writing Books

Marisol Cortez (The University of Texas at San Antonio), Luz at Midnight, Flowersong Press, 2020.

Judges’ comments: “Marisol Cortez’s Luz at Midnight is ambitious, challenging, and essential. This novel ranges across prose, poetry, research notes, emails, and newspaper articles, blurring the boundaries of “conventional” genre in ways long overdue. Who gets to speak? How do we get to speak? This novel offers readers in and beyond the academy–who may not often see themselves or their experiences represented in environmental literature–hope and paths toward visible voice. Luz at Midnight defies imperialism both in form, as research notes become poems that become prose that reaches across time and space, and in content, as we follow a group of environmental activists in San Antonio who, like their author, bend genre and convention so that oft-silenced voices can and must be heard. Luz at Midnight shows us these silencings–and shows us how, in the face of that silencing, to keep existing and keep finding voice. No tidy conclusions in this novel, and no utopias, but Cortez’s characters model an inspiring willingness to remain. An outstanding debut prose work from whom environmental literature has much to learn.”

Judges’ comments: “In Petra Kuppers’s Gut Botany, body and language bloom open to bear witness to ecological, linguistic, and human wounds, grief, and healing. We are in the body in these poems, feeling the ache in a hip alongside the slippery pleasure of love—and, importantly, Gut Botany works with a body far too often silenced in environmental and contemporary literature. Kuppers shows her speaker’s existence as a “gender-non-conforming nebula,” as a person with a wheelchair, and as a survivor of assault, together with richly textured and evocative accounts of Michigan waterways and the sturgeon. Through surrealism and situationist poetry, Kuppers resists heteropatriarchy, ableism, and settler-colonialism through deep interconnection with the sentient ecologies around her. Gut Botany shows the interconnection of human and more-than-human bodies through the porous flow of water and of language. “Silica water rushes pearl kernels onto the land,” she writes, “Make yourself this place, / bones open into embrace, / my face outward, into the wind’s curvature.” Here is a book that shows what it is to inhabit a particular body, with its legacies of trauma and privilege, and to work through language—itself also a medium of trauma and privilege—in ways that acknowledge and choose respectful existence.”

Ecocriticism Book

Cajetan Iheka (Yale University), Naturalizing Africa: Ecological Violence, Agency, and Postcolonial Resistance in African Literature, Cambridge University Press, 2017.

Judges’ comments: “Naturalizing Africa brings together the previously separate conversations of postcolonial ecocriticism, environmental justice, and new materialism. It deftly weaves together the work of major ecocritical scholars such as Nixon, Haraway, Caminero-Santangelo, Iovino and Oppermann, and to sharply critique a status quo (the anthropocentrism of postcolonial studies).”

Environmental Creative Writing Book

Elizabeth Rush (Brown University), Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore, Milkweed Editions, 2018.

Judges’ comments: “Rising offers a vivid, compassionate, and personal account of meetings with extraordinary people who, living on the margins of both our continent and our society, are most directly and tragically affected by global warming. A compelling, masterful blend of journalism, social critique, and personal discovery that brings climate change right to the reader’s door.”

Environmental Creative Writing Book

Lauret Savoy (Mount Holyoke College), Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape, Counterpoint Press, 2016.

Judges’ comments: “Lauret Savoy’s Trace is an impeccably researched and gracefully written meditation on landscape, memory, and race. An important book that speaks directly and memorably to current political and theoretical concerns, Trace maps the links between personal and cultural memory, showing how place reveals itself through the erasures of human and geologic history.”

Ecocriticism Book

Jesse Oak Taylor (University of Washington), The Sky of Our Manufacture: The London Fog in British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf, University of Virginia Press, 2016.

Judges’ comments: “A richly layered analysis of the atmosphere of toxicity beginning in nineteenth century England and shadowing our own contemporary world, this book fills a significant gap in terms of ecocritical work on both the Victorian and modern eras. Indeed, The Sky of Our Manufacture makes a persuasive case for literature of that period as Anthropocene literature – and, in so doing, offers one of the strongest accounts of Anthropocene literature currently available. Taylor’s grasp of environmental history, material and economic theory, and illuminating textual readings is a model of ecocriticism. The book is also elegantly written, admirably focused, and highly original.”

Ecocriticism Book

Nicole Seymour (California State University, Fullerton), Strange Natures: Futurity, Empathy, and the Queer Ecological Imagination, University of Illinois Press, 2013.

Judges’ comments: “Nicole Seymour’s Strange Natures: Futurity, Empathy, and the Queer Ecological Imagination is an ambitious, intelligent, and subtle intervention on the longstanding division between queer theory and the “natural.” Building on a deep appreciation of how the natural has historically been deployed against sexualities and identities outside the heteronormative, and the links between that violence and environmental degradation, Seymour identifies vitally important tradition of queer environmentalism in contemporary literature and film from the Americas. Strange Natures is a major contribution to the queering of ecocriticism and the greening of queer theory.”

Environmental Creative Writing Book

Emily McGiffin (York University), Subduction Zone, Pedlar Press, 2014.

Judges’ comments: “McGiffin’s poetry startles and provokes, even as it pleases and draws the reader in. Impressively, she takes on subject matter as immense as empire–its power over us yet vulnerability to self-destruction–and makes it vivid, personal, and immediate.”

Ecocriticism Book

Rob Nixon (University of Wisconsin, Madison), Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Harvard University Press, 2011.

Judges’ comments: “The book’s strength is its comparative theoretical framework resulting in an expansion of geographical and chronological scales elided by contemporary media and our own representational traditions. The eloquent framing of the project with Rachel Carson, Edward Said, and Ramanchandra Guha charts an important comparative method for further studies in transnational environmental justice movements. …His analysis offers important insights into both the strengths and the limitations of critical categories such as environmentalism and postcolonialism.”

Environmental Creative Writing Book

David Gessner (University of North Carolina, Wilmington), The Tarball Chronicles: A Journey Beyond the Oiled Pelican and into the Heart of the Gulf Oil Spill, Milkweed Press, 2011.

Judges’ comments: “David Gessner’s The Tarball Chronicles takes the lyrical tradition of nature writing, adds a bit of a badass persona reminiscent of Edward Abbey, and brings both into the blighted Gulf of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Along the way, Gessner cultivates relationships that allow people across cultural, geographic, and political gaps to recognize their common interest in saving what is left in the world.  Gessner doesn’t hide from the damage, even as he asserts that there is a profound beauty still in nature, and that, if the future may not offer much hope, there’s still, as Thoreau might say, a world out there to be lived in. And good lives–both human and not–still being led.”

Ecocritical Book

Stacy Alaimo (University of Texas, Arlington), Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self, Indiana University Press, 2010.

Creative Writing Book

Jeffrey Thomson (University of Maine, Farmington), Birdwatching in Wartime, Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2009.

Ecocritical Book

Paul Outka (Florida State University), Race and Nature from Transcendentalism to the Harlem Renaissance, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

Creative Writing Book

Elizabeth Dodd (Kansas State University), In the Mind’s Eye: Essays across the Animate World, University of Nebraska Press, 2008.

Ecocritical Book

Robert N. Watson (UCLA), Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.

Creative Writing Book

Gretchen Legler, On the Ice: An Intimate Portrait of Life at McMurdo Station, Antarctica, Milkweed, 2005.