Tucked away between the Olympic Mountains and the Puget Sound is Port Townsend, WA. Growing up I spent my time exploring the Olympic Peninsula, from its highest peaks amongst the mountains to the many inlets and bays that traced the place I call home. During the summers I was fortunate enough to stay with family up in the B.C. Gulf Islands in Canada, where I spent endless days sailing on the water. I attended Pacific University in Oregon for my B.A. as a first generation college student, where I majored in Art History with minors in Sociology and Criminal Justice, Law, & Society. My academic focuses were rooted in my passion for sustainable agriculture as a fifth generation dairy farmer. I studied environmental and social harms of industrial agriculture, ancient Greek philosophy on sustainable agriculture, and sustainable food systems. Wanting to create change on my campus, I served on the executive boards for the Animal Ethics Club and Students for Environmental Activism, and was employed by the university’s Center for a Sustainable Society. Off campus I volunteered on various farms and interned at Foodways at Nana Cardoon, a non-profit urban farm and learning center. Through this role I was able to connect the community with the local farms through sustainable food systems to help fight food injustices in the area and create a sense of interdependency.

In my time here, I have delved into important and necessary environmental aspects that regenerative agriculture promotes, but I primarily focus on the community dimensions and how  regenerative practices not only enhance soil health but also build community resilience and reconnect people with the lands. I aim to highlight community relations and practices as a part of the working regenerative system. In my research I integrate the three core principles of regenerative agriculture from a community standpoint: 1) soil; 2) education and community knowledge; 3) food security. My research has taken place in the Tuality Plains region within Oregon’s Willamette Valley. Within this region, businesses, farms, education centers, community gardens, and nonprofit organizations have been established and they are advancing sustained food security and resiliency through regenerative agriculture. The analysis of how this has developed and how it operates will be explored through creative non-fiction essays, following the community throughout their different ways of interacting with these practices.

Outside of the program, I am still volunteering at Foodways at Nana Cardoon remotely and doing graphic design work, and find myself digging my hands into the dirt and engaging with local farms in Salt Lake Valley as well as community organizations focused on sustainable food systems. Outside of my studies, I can often be found galloping in the Wasatch Mountains, trail running, hiking, skiing and snowshoeing, hammocking, and rock climbing!

I was born and raised in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, where values of localism informed my identity and instilled in me a strong sense of place. After high school, I attended Bates College and graduated in 2020 with a BA in Environmental Studies and a minor in Gender Studies. During my time in Maine, I sought to build community within my college town through food justice work, volunteerism, and community-engaged research. Coursework in the interdisciplinary field of environmental studies led to my undergraduate thesis, which focused on photojournalistic coverage of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico through lenses of colonialism and slow violence. After graduation, I moved to Nashville, where I spent time as a nanny, Americorps member, and communications coordinator for an environmental nonprofit.

In my graduate studies, I have explored the interconnections among placemaking, resilience, and environmental justice through a communication lens. My current environmental humanities work focuses on decolonization through place (re)naming. As a Mellon Fellow, I work with Tracy Aviary’s Nature Center at Pia Okwai on critical communication projects that center Indigenous Ecological Knowledges and sense of belonging in community-based spaces.  My research is informed by the fields of Indigenous research methodologies, community based research, and critical public relations.

Outside of school, I enjoy being outdoors, listening to live music, building community, and spending quality time with my partner and our pets.

I was born and raised in a small town in Upstate New York and then attended Hamilton College for my undergraduate education. Upon the outbreak of COVID, I started to appreciate the geographic isolation of rural NY more and more. Throughout those years, I cultivated a deeper connection to the place I grew up in, and the entanglement of human and non-human communities became central to this attachment. Already passionate about political organizing and climate change, I found the convergence of political theory and the environment to be deeply inspiring.

While at Hamilton, I conducted research projects with the East Wind Intentional Community on postcapitalism and prefigurative politics (published in Communal Societies), as well as with the nonprofit Tidelines Institute on alternative environmental education and activism. These explorations culminated in my government honors thesis on the praxis of social ecology’s communalism, in an effort to illustrate the potentiality of environmental theory to inspire and inform a liberated future. 

During my time with the Environmental Humanities program, I seek to continue transcending theory and practice in all I do by bringing the academic into the personal and vice versa. I spent my summer facilitating community education classes around themes of climate justice and environmental political philosophy at the Nature Center at Pia Okwai. That experience is building towards my thesis– a critical geography and political ecology analysis of movement-building in a constrained community space. I’ve also been extremely fortunate to receive support from the EH program, the Graduate School, and the College of Humanities to present my work at the Western Political Science Association conference, as well as the upcoming Transnational Institute for Social Ecology conference this fall.

Outside of the Program, I can be found teaching as a field instructor with the Wasatch Mountain Institute, galloping around the surrounding mountains and deserts with my wonderful cohort, exploring coffee shops, and participating in the activist community.

I was born and raised in the Salt Lake Valley on occupied Shoshone, Goshute, and Ute lands. I spent most of my childhood in the mountains hunting, fishing, and exploring with my dad and grandpa. These experiences sparked in me a lifelong curiosity, a passion for learning about the natural world, and a deep connection to this land and its many inhabitants.  

After graduating from the University of Utah with degrees in History and Social Work, I worked at a local organization focusing on advancing grassroots leadership and racial equity in education. I also became involved in community organizing efforts focused on mutual aid, transportation justice, and queer liberation. Through these experiences, I have grown deep community roots here in Salt Lake City and am excited to continue to do so through place-based and community-engaged work in this program.   

Over my lifetime the effects of climate change in Utah have become impossible to ignore. I have seen first-hand the crises the Great Salt Lake faces and the disproportionate effects of air quality on communities of color and low-income communities here. This has invigorated me to dig my heels in and fight for my community (both human and beyond).

These experiences and interests have led me to partner with Of Salt and Sand, a local storytelling organization, for my Mellon Fellowship to explore what it means to stay (and thrive) in Utah through climate crisis and economic transition. My project focuses on environmental justice, energy systems, and community engagement in Southeastern Utah. Through this work I have the privilege to connect to and learn from community leaders with a wealth of lived expertise and experience engaging in these topics. I feel honored to learn from so many as part of this program and continue to put my values into action.

Outside of the program you’ll likely find me running, biking, at a community event, or hanging out with my dog, Otie. I also love reading sci-fi and fantasy, wildlife spotting, and live music.

My name is Quinn Luthy and I use they/them pronouns. I am ecstatic to be back for my second year at the Environmental Humanities Graduate program, on the unceded homelands of the Ute, Paiute, Goshute, Shoshone, and Navajo people. Before coming to the University of Utah, I was living in New York City, where I attended The New School and got a degree in Literary Studies. I also worked in the NYC publishing industry, and was a research assistant to Anne Waldman. I have always been deeply interested in questions of queer ecology, which is what I am studying here! This year, I am writing a thesis dissertation that explores two queer ecologies; the Minetta Creek, and Jacob Riis beach. I am also working with Torrey House Press and the University of Utah’s Creative Writing Department, which I am very excited about!

I was born and raised in Durango, Colorado, and am privileged to have been able to grow up skiing, hiking, and bouldering, activities which I continue to do to this day. I also spent a year in high school in Nonthaburi, Thailand as a Rotary Youth Exchange Student. My year in Thailand was deeply formative for me, as it was the first place where I was able to foster a queer community. I have always strived to meet wonderful people wherever I have lived that I love, and who have loved me, from Durango, to Thailand, to New York, to Salt Lake City. I am so happy to be back in the Rocky Mountains, and am working to foster my queer identity, and my deep passion for the environment through my research here at EH. I am so grateful to the EH program, faculty, and my cohort for uplifting and supporting me always.

You may be able to find me and my cohort galloping across the sagebrush grasslands that surround the Salt Lake Valley. I am a writer, researcher, and queer ecologist. I publish poetry, fiction, and nonfiction that center queer ecological themes, you can find my writing at quinnluthy.com. I have written extensively about dandelions, the Newtown Creek, and various waterways, and am always working on writing something new, or swimming in an alpine lake. My headshot was taken by my wonderful partner, Jonathan Lovett. Thank you so much for reading and take care!

Since first learning about the gravity of climate change at Yale-NUS College, where I received my BA (Hons) in Psychology, I have meandered through stints in behavioral insights and nudging, global health and healthcare, grassroots organizing and advocacy writing, facilitating conversations about climate action, and software product management in green tech startups, before arriving at the environmental humanities. This weathered my understanding of and ways of responding to the malaise surrounding ecological and existential disharmony (of which I've come to recognize climate change as one of many intertwined symptoms and mediators). At this juncture, the journey has returned me to the practices of feeling, placemaking, and creative expression and communication that was central in the headwaters of my youth in Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan, and for that I am grateful.

In my first year, I drew from a range of methods to gallop with various texts and topics. I reflected on Singapore's land 'reclamation' practices in a book chapter titled Sea Expropriation: Unearthing the Violence Beneath the Garden City, published in Dark Mountain Issue 25. This also inspired a cartographic elegy forthcoming in the 2024 issue of the University of Arizona's you are here, the Journal of Creative Geography, and led to a panel presentation at the University of Birmingham's International Conference of Three Societies on Literature and Science, and a poster at ADHO's DH2024.

Collaborating with other EH scholars at Colby College, I examined climate change representation in the 250 most watched films of the last decade in an empirical ecocritical study which has been published as a public report with Good Energy and is forthcoming as a journal article. I was also a fellow at Colby's 2024 Summer Institute in Environmental Humanities, where I workshopped a screenplay about rising sea levels and environmental justice.

Using ethnography and archival research, I wrote a piece on pickup basketball as an ecological practice of surrender, which won the University of Utah's Excellence in Writing award for Best Graduate Student Seminar Paper, and which I presented on at the Fifteenth International Conference on Sport & Society at the University of Granada. I have also written an ecocritical piece on David OReilly's Everything which I presented on at Keystone DH 2024 at Penn State Behrend, and made a video for University of Toronto's 6th Interactive Film and Media Virtual Conference.

Currently, I am working on my thesis, a practice informed by posthumanism and daoism with the aim of departing from the dualisms underlying ecological and existential disharmony. This will enfold a phygital interactive exhibition about more-than-human beings I'm collaborating on with other Southeast Asian artists, titled Found Library, as well as other multimedia creative pieces.

Heya! My name’s Grego, I’m Colombian by way of Texas, and happy to be starting my second year in the program. I’ve recently decided to focus on genre and speculative fiction—horror especially—and its relationship to rootlessness and belonging, class and anti-colonial struggles, and the environment, with a special focus on narratives coming out of Latin America and by Indigenous writers in North America. I’m interested in why we tell scary stories, what they are uniquely equipped to tell, and what kind of a disposition towards ‘nature’ and social and environmental forces terror constitutes. The relationship between fantasy and literary realism, as well as genre boundaries, the social relations they encode, and the ways that authors in the Latin American corpus have sidestepped or undermined them are major themes in my research. My master’s project will involve a collection of brief fiction works and a theoretical companion piece.

In the long term, I am preparing to pursue other academic interests in the life sciences, the philosophy of science and technology, and political-economic thought. I like to cook, hang out, gallop, and wander the wilderness. I spend a whole lot of time doodling, geeking out on horror movies and weird books, and blasting punk and other flavors of rowdy music into my ears.

My connection to environmentalism is tied to my childhood memories of playing outside in Oklahoma. Realizing that not every child is fortunate to play in a clean environment, my goal is to influence change in a more unified direction. I am a veteran, researcher, student of Indigenous research methodologies, and Black feminist at the University of Utah, on the unceded homelands of the Ute, Paiute, Goshute, Shoshone, and Navajo people.

I received my B.A. in Humanities and minor in Sustainability at San Diego State University (SDSU), on the ancestral homelands of the Kumeyaay. While attending SDSU, I received the 2023 Student Symposium Research Award for Diversity, Inclusion, and Social Justice for #EnvironmentalJustice.Now, a social media-based campaign for environmental justice in a historic immigrant residential neighborhood. Continuing my journey of environmental justice within Environmental Humanities, I am currently researching Black Food Sovereignty after a summer of research in my hometown of Oklahoma City. In preparation for a thesis project, I have researched Black placemaking as a form of resistance within communities that are underinvested and underdeveloped. A goal of my research journey is to center on Black and Indigenous scholars. Since moving to Utah, I spend my free time being in community with others, visiting the Bonneville Salt Flats, and galloping with my fellow Environmental Humanities cohort across Antelope Island.

I grew up in St. Petersburg, Florida, the land of sun and pelicans. In 2020, I received my B.A. in Comparative Literature and Society from Columbia University with a focus on ecological thought and writing. While I was in New York, I got involved in community service and activism thanks to organizations like Community Lunch Soup Kitchen and XR NYC.

Between 2020 and 2023, I worked at the Center for Sustainable Development. I organized the Aristotle-Confucius Symposium on Ethics for the 21st Century, a project that brought interdisciplinary experts together to explore how ancient philosophy can inform our approach to modern challenges. I also coordinated a documentary film project that involved traveling to world heritage sites to tell the story of human globalization.

The past few years have involved a lot of movement. I am endlessly grateful to have landed in Salt Lake City as a student in the Environmental Humanities Program. During my time here, I have found rootedness in place, learned lifelong lessons from my community, and continued to explore the links between art and activism. As a community engagement fellow, I am collaborating with local poets and artists in their efforts to save Great Salt Lake. As a result, I have spent more time dressed up as a pelican this year than I expected. I am so deeply thankful to be part of this movement and this Lake-facing community.

My time in EH has also given me the opportunity to develop as a writer. I write speculative short stories that explore issues of ecocide, queerness, and disability. In my writing and research, I have been inspired by the work of Donna Haraway, Linda Hogan, and adrienne maree brown, theories like degrowth and emergent strategy, the philosophies of Buddhism and Taoism, the manifesto of the Dark Mountain Project, ecological novels like The Deluge, Weather, and A Tale for the Time Being, and radical climate justice movements.

I am especially interested in the role of art and performance in activism, and how storytelling, dance, and theater can help inspire cultural shifts and facilitate collective action.

I recently completed my undergraduate degree at the University of Wyoming with a double major in American studies and environmental and natural resources. These two-degree programs helped me develop an interdisciplinary perspective and, more importantly, gave me an up-close
view of the intersection of nature and culture. The research projects, coursework, readings, and field studies that comprised these programs kindled my interest in environmental humanities. 

One of my main research interests within my undergraduate programs was to analyze how land defines experience and identity, and additionally, the ways in which land gives definition and support beyond its natural resources. Furthermore, I began researching the Great Salt Lake, located in Northern Utah, and the climate crises it would ensue if the lake were to completely dry up.

My goal within the environmental humanities graduate program is to produce a substantial research portfolio. In general, I am interested in projects that underscore the human causes of environmental crises. More specifically, I am interested in continuing my research on the demise of the Great Salt Lake, looking deeper into the historical, political, and economic factors that pushed it to its current state. I am also hoping to dive into the world of the commercial fishing industry, how it contributes to overfishing, a dying ocean, and waste. In the process, I want to understand and uncover how the culture of consumerism fuels the industry, and what avenues can be taken to re-shape that culture.

All my life I’ve been told that Utah Lake is a damaged place. Sister to Great Salt Lake, connected by the north-flowing Jordan River, the lake at the center of Utah Valley has a complicated reputation issue. People frown and shake heads whenever this body of water comes up in conversation. I too believed the negative sentiments, accepted them, thought nothing of it.  Daily, for the first thirteen years I lived near the shore, I admired the view of a massive freshwater lake from the windows of my home, from afar. But I didn’t actually see the lake and most definitely didn’t have any true form of relationship. Then in November of 2021, in efforts to recover from back surgery, I started walking the path along the North Shore every day. I quickly realized that the toxic stories were out-dated and there was a wealth of wondrous things I didn’t know.

Once my eyes, heart, and mind were opened to the truth of Utah Lake, I immediately began advocacy work using my many years experience as a writer, public speaker, and event organizer. I participated in successful efforts to protect the lake from a massive dredging and island building development proposal, wrote essays for Torrey House Press, shared nature photography and lake facts through social media, and currently serve as the volunteer director of public outreach for the nonprofit Conserve Utah Valley. These experiences and a desire to do more led me to the Environmental Humanities Program at the University of Utah. My work in the program is dedicated to changing the cultural narrative of Utah Lake through public-facing writing and community engagement.

I grew up in Sacramento, California and learned from an early age to love the mountains, the beach and all of the gorgeous nature Northern California has to offer. I pursued my undergraduate studies here at the University of Utah, where I earned a bachelor's of science in Environmental and Sustainability Studies with an emphasis in Conservation and Land Management, alongside a minor in Anthropology. I was initially drawn to the University of Utah at the young age of 15 for its athletics as I committed to play soccer here, but what truly won me over was the campus’s amazing location nestled within the Wasatch Front. I am incredibly grateful to continue my education in such a remarkable environment.

My whole life, I have always held a deep reverence and awe of nature. I have also been aware of its crumbling state from a young age and knew I wanted to work to both protect nature and shield all people from the effects of our society's misuse of the land. I knew without a shadow of a
doubt coming into college I wanted to learn about the environment and work to protect and enhance the nature around us for the rest of my life. Throughout my undergraduate studies, as I delved into both the complexities of the environment and the intricate system of humanity simultaneously, I have only become more convinced of my commitment to work with both people and nature to bring about tangible change and progress in the lives of both humans and the environment.

There is a sense of immediacy ingrained within the environmental crisis, compelling me to want to take action on both on the ground as well as in policy in order to contribute to making a meaningful difference as soon as possible. Each passing year brings with it increasingly devastating impacts, a result of our society's blatant misuse of the natural world that sustains us. Even worse though, is the clear inequality ingrained within the environmental issues pervading our entire world. Globally many areas with the least ecological footprint bear the brunt of other nations over extension of their own resources. However, the disparities are not just a global concern; they are glaringly present within our own cities. For this reason as I move into the next phase of my education I hope to focus my research on environmental justice, especially within communities I have personal ties to. I am especially interested in energy justice and how underserved communities are disproportionately affected by our nation's energy infrastructure.

Outside of school, I enjoy staying active by playing sports, hiking, snowboarding, and anything and everything having to do with water. I'm a huge sports fan and attend as many different Utah games and competitions as I can. Overall, I love spending time with my people and being
outdoors, which is why I have loved being in Utah.

I grew up in Boise, Idaho, on the contemporary, ancestral, and unceded land of the Shoshone, Bannock, and Northern Paiute people. I left Idaho to complete my BA in comparative literature at Reed College. After my undergraduate studies, I taught English at a primary school in Requena, Spain. Before joining the Environmental Humanities program, I worked for several years as a permit administrator for the Bureau of Parks and Recreation in Portland, OR. During my time with the Parks Bureau, I organized with the City of Portland Professional Workers Union.

I am beginning my graduate studies by following a line of inquiry that is at once historical and speculative, asking both what haptic ecological philosophies have been and what haptic ecological philosophy could consist of.

My interests include but are not limited to the politics of aesthetics, ecocinema, environmental media & media studies, environmental history, pedagogy, literature, labor history, intellectual history, and amateurism as an act of love.

A midwestern transplant to Utah in my youth, I have called the Wasatch front my home for most of my life. I attended the University of Utah for my undergraduate career studying Kinesiology and Parks, Recreation, and Tourism with minors in Ecology and Geography. Post-graduation, I have worked with a myriad of organizations centering on food justice, queer liberation,  environmental education and stewardship, outdoor recreation, decolonization, and more. During and after my time in school, I found myself in Salt Lake City’s queer community and outdoor spaces and communities surrounding them. In my free time, I enjoy reading, crafting, and exploring our backyard valley and mountains on foot, by bike, on skis, and however else I’m able.

In my free time and in my work, I found the intersection of the things I love doing was largely the environmental humanities. As I began to engage with the environmental humanities from the community side, I came across this program and am excited to explore it from a scholastic standpoint. I’m interested in researching natural spaces in non-traditional environments, access to environmental/experiential education and outdoor recreation, and community connections to natural spaces. I am honored to be working as a Mellon Fellow and hope that will allow me to incorporate community engagement throughout my project and research no matter what topic I end up with.

I’m from San Diego, California, and I graduated from Pomona College in 2020 with a degree in English. I didn’t get involved in outdoor activities until COVID drew me and my friends to explore. That’s when I camped and backpacked for the first time. I then started teaching high school students in academic and outdoor education settings at semester-schools like the High Mountain Institute (Leadville, CO) and The Traveling School (Western U.S. semester). I loved teaching literature of the West in a place-based context,  like reading Natalie Díaz’s poetry on a canoe trip on the Colorado River, or Terry Tempest Williams while backpacking in southern Utah’s vast canyon networks.

During this program, I plan to formally engage in the research that I’ve been doing informally for the last several years. I will continue to examine the history and literature of the West, focusing on southern Utah and its public lands.

Some of my other interests include nature documentaries, the gelato place near my apartment, Indian food, layover days on backpacking trips, walking my rescue dog in the park, alpine lakes, planning other peoples’ trips, taking my e-bike up hills, samples at the farmers market, used bookstores, queer community, topographic maps, doodling, podcasts, throwing small foods in the air and catching them in my mouth.

Raised in Colorado, alpine landscapes, thin air, and distinct seasons forged my insatiable curiosity of the outdoors. With a drive to understand the intricate relationships between people and place on a global scale, I received a B.A. in International Studies at the University of Washington, captivated by diverse cultures, languages, histories, and knowledges. As an undergraduate student, I focused on Spanish, Latin American studies, and borderlands. I pursued interdisciplinary research, working on cybersecurity policy, migration ethnographies, treaty building, and international development contracts. Along with academic research, I learned experientially through studying abroad in Ecuador, Costa Rica, and Italy, and worked for UW’s outdoor program when back in Seattle. Over the past four years, I have returned to Ecuador three times to work with Kichwa communities on food sovereignty projects in the Andes.

After my undergraduate studies, I spent a year learning about cultural land practices by traveling around the world and completing an environmentally-focused work exchange and long-distance trek in every country I visited. Inspired by an outdoor lifestyle, I returned to Seattle to work as a climbing and mountaineering instructor across beautiful Pacific Northwest landscapes and continue the international development research I had begun at UW. Now, my research interests lay at the intersection of glaciers, Indigenous knowledge, food systems, and temporality.

When not reading, chatting, or writing about the Environmental Humanities, I can be found wandering on and off trails in the mountains, riding my bike around campus, or talking to my tomato plants. I love evoking play and child-like senses of wonder at every possibility in life!

I was raised in the Blackland Prairie ecoregion of Texas in a place called Richardson. I have equal love for the pecan trees and hot concrete that surrounded me. My environmental work began at The University of Texas at Austin where I co-led a project to restore part of campus to its native Blackland Prairie ecology. The collaborations that enabled the “Little Blue Prairie” convinced me that I had something to contribute to making the world a better place. As we planned, planted, maintained, partnered, promoted, and even burned the prairie, I struggled with telling a just story of the land that fostered a new land ethic. My passion for environmental storytelling led me to pursue a degree in English and introduced me to the field of Environmental Humanities. After graduating, I kissed the prairie goodbye and sought larger-scale environmental restoration experience in Seattle, Washington where I stewarded riparian and wetland ecosystems to support salmon and the myriad cultures dependent upon them.

Buddhism increasingly influences my environmental and political thinking. I’m coming to the EHUM program after having spent a year in residence at Green Gulch Farm and Zen Center as well as Tassajara Zen Mountain Center. These experiences helped me appreciate the power of ritual, forms, ancestors, and contemplative practice.

In my research, I’m interested in how religious communities reinterpret their traditions in the light of contemporary social issues like the climate crisis and ongoing racial violence. BIPOC Buddhists have led the movement towards a decolonial Buddhism that is socially engaged, culminating in the development of novel forms of practice. I’m particularly interested in EcoDharma, which emphasizes the ecological teachings of Buddhism that often intersect with Indigenous thought, and Black Buddhism, which understands Black feminism and Black radical thought to be extensions of the Buddha’s teachings for more harmonious living.

In my free time, you can find me walking around my neighborhood learning plant names, exploring musical subcultures one album at a time, or reading graphic novels.

I received my B.S. in Environmental Science from Northeastern University, where I was a leader in the DivestNU fossil fuel divestment movement (which it still has not done in 2024, let’s get with the program, Northeastern!). 
I’ve worked variously as a renewable energy developer, science communicator, bike tour guide, wild blueberry researcher, and in a variety of service industry jobs. I am a new resident of Utah and am keen to explore the region through academic, recreation, and artistic lenses. I am a budding birder and, when I can remember to bring my binoculars with me, love identifying unfamiliar birds and later playing that bird in boisterous games of Wingspan.
My research interests include: exploring how people connect to landscape, how connection to land encourages advocacy, and how outdoor recreation might connect folks to human and non-human communities. I am excited to see how these interests are shaped by my interactions with my peers and new community in Utah. Some of the works that have most transformed my thinking over the past decade include: Nature’s Economy by Donald Worster, Mill Town by Kerri Arsenault, Hood Feminism by Mikki Kendall, The Wild Places by Robert Macfarlane, and The Rambunctious Garden by Emma Marris.

I was born and raised in Georgia, but have made homes in California, Washington, Alaska, New York, and now Utah. I’ve also been fortunate to travel internationally around South America, Oceania, and Asia. Being “on the run” these past few years gave me a strong desire to interpret sense of place, and how others view themselves while living and breathing in their environments.

I graduated from the University of Alaska Fairbanks with an Interdisciplinary degree in Ecological Thought. At UAF, I was a member of the Climate Scholars and active in the local Climate Action Coalition, which focused on organizing the community around environmental justice practices. It was a privilege to be a part of these networks, the environmental movement remains predominantly white, and I was always the only Black person in these spaces. I understand the isolation nonwhite people can face in nature and am constantly searching for ways to mitigate these feelings. I was motivated to join the Environmental Humanities program to bring renewed discussion around Black eco experiences. I hope to recenter our voices not only in conversations but in the foundations of this discipline.

The work of many Black feminists, such as Angela Davis, Aph Ko, and Alice Walker, intersections of Black fugitivity and bodies, interconnections of animality and human consumption, ecowomanism, and Black radical traditions inspire and influence my work.