ASLE Book & Paper Awards

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.