Book Launch: Elizabeth Rush's Rising

Join Milkweed Editions to celebrate the launch of Elizabeth Rush’s book Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore, a work of lyrical reportage about sea level rise, vulnerable communities, and adaptability. After Rush reads from the book, Macalester professor Christie Manning—whose work explores psychology and climate change—will lead a conversation with Rush. A book signing will follow.

6:30 pm | Doors Open
7:00 pm | Program
8:00 pm | Book Signing

Invite your friends and share on Facebook!

“Sea level rise is not some distant problem in a distant place. As Elizabeth Rush shows, it’s affecting real people right now. Rising is a compelling piece of reporting, by turns bleak and beautiful.”
—ELIZABETH KOLBERT, AUTHOR OF THE SIXTH EXTINCTION

ABOUT RISING: DISPATCHES FROM THE NEW AMERICAN SHORE
In this highly original work of lyrical reportage, Elizabeth Rush guides readers through some of the places where rising seas are already transforming the coastline of the United States in irrevocable ways: from the Gulf Coast to Miami, and from New York City to the Bay Area. For many of the plants, animals, and humans in these places, the options are stark: retreat or perish in place.

Weaving firsthand accounts from those facing this choice—a Staten Islander who lost her father during Sandy, the remaining holdouts of a Native American community on a drowning Isle de Jean Charles, a neighborhood in Pensacola settled by escaped slaves hundreds of years ago—with profiles of wildlife biologists, activists, and other members of the communities both currently at risk and already displaced, Rising privileges the voices of those usually kept at the margins.

At once polyphonic and precise, Rising is a shimmering meditation on vulnerability and on vulnerable communities, both human and more than human, and on how to let go of the places we love.

ELIZABETH RUSH is the author of Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore and Still Lifes from a Vanishing City: Essays and Photographs from Yangon, Myanmar. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Washington Post, Harpers, Guernica, Granta, Orion, and the New Republic, among others. She is the recipient of fellowships and grants including the Howard Foundation Fellowship, awarded by Brown University; the Society for Environmental Journalism Grant; the Metcalf Institute Climate Change Adaptation Fellowship; and the Science in Society Award from the National Association of Science Writers. She received her MFA in nonfiction from Southern New Hampshire University, and teaches creative nonfiction at Brown University.

CHRISTIE MANNING is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. Her research and teaching explore the cognitive, social and situational factors that influence people’s behavioral and lifestyle choices and how these choices positively or negatively impact ecological systems. She is particularly interested in people’s cognitive and emotional response to information about climate change.