Reading Lists

13 Lists
  • Nonfiction
    Elizabeth Rush

    An astonishing, vital book about Antarctica, climate change, and motherhood from the author of Rising, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction.

  • Nonfiction
    Scott Chaskey

    As a farmer with decades spent working in fields, Scott Chaskey has been shaped by daily attention to the earth. A leader in the international Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) movement, he has combined a longstanding commitment to food

  • Nonfiction
    Chris Dombrowski

    Spending time in wild places with their children, Chris Dombrowski learns that their youthful sense of wonder at the beauty and connectivity of the more-than-human world is not naivete to be shed, but rather wisdom most of us lose along the way

  • Nonfiction
    Elizabeth Rush

    Rising weaves the firsthand accounts of those who are living through sea level rise today with eyewitness reporting from our shoreline’s disappearing places.

  • Nonfiction
    Margaret Renkl

    From Margaret Renkl comes an unusual, captivating portrait of a family—and of the cycles of joy and grief that inscribe human lives within the natural world.

  • Fiction
    Diane Wilson

    A haunting novel spanning several generations, following a Dakota family’s struggle to preserve their way of life and their sacrifices to protect what matters most.

  • Nonfiction
    Kerri ní Dochartaigh

    In Thin Places, a luminous blend of memoir, history, and nature writing, Kerri ní Dochartaigh explores how nature kept her sane and helped her heal after The Troubles.

  • Nonfiction
    Margaret Renkl

    In a patchwork quilt of personal and reported essays, Margaret Renkl’s columns offer a dose of natural beauty, human decency, and persistent hope from her home in Nashville.

  • Nonfiction
    Kazim Ali

    In building relationships with his former neighbors, Ali explores questions of land and power―and in remembering a lost connection to this place, finally finds a home he might belong to.

  • Nonfiction
    J. Drew Lanham

    This memoir is a riveting exploration of the contradictions of Black identity in the rural South, asking what it means to be “the rare bird, the oddity.”

  • Nonfiction
    Annick Smith and Susan O’Connor

    A multicultural anthology about the enduring importance and shifting associations of the hearth in our world.

  • Poetry
    Claire Wahmanholm

    A haunting collection that inhabits a disquieting future where fear is the governing body, “the organ and the tissue / and the cell, the membrane and the organelle.”

  • Nonfiction
    Joni Tevis

    From a haunted widow’s wildly expanding mansion to atomic test sites in the Nevada desert, the settings of these essays are often places of destruction and loss. And yet this collection transforms these eerie, apocalyptic destinations into sites of…

  • Nonfiction
    Amy Leach

    These essays take jellyfish, fainting goats, and imperturbable caterpillars as just a few of their many inspirations. Surveying both the tiniest earth dwellers and the most far-flung celestial bodies, this is a book of wonder, one readers cannot help…

  • Nonfiction
    William Souder

    In the century and a half since John James Audubon’s death, his name has become synonymous with wildlife conservation and natural history. But few people know what a complicated figure he was—or the dramatic story behind The Birds of America—as…

  • Nonfiction
    Tim Robinson

    In the second volume of his beloved Connemara trilogy, cartographer Tim Robinson continues to unearth the stories of this rich landscape—weaving placelore, etymology, geology, and the meeting of sea and shore into the region’s mythologies.

    • Poetry
      Yalie Saweda Kamara

      Yalie Saweda Kamara’s Besaydoo is an elegantly wrought love song to home—as place, as people, as body, and as language. Yalie Saweda Kamara writes for a new America, where praise is plentiful and Black lives flourish.

    • Poetry
      JJJJJerome Ellis

      A polyphonic new entry in Multiverse, JJJJJerome Ellis’s Aster of Ceremonies beautifully rewrites history, creating a world that blooms backward, reimagining what it means for Black and disabled people to have taken, and to continue to take, their

    • Nonfiction
      Chris Dombrowski

      Spending time in wild places with their children, Chris Dombrowski learns that their youthful sense of wonder at the beauty and connectivity of the more-than-human world is not naivete to be shed, but rather wisdom most of us lose along the way

    • Poetry
      Ada Limón
      Longlisted for for the Griffin Poetry Prize Longlisted for the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize
      An astonishing collection about interconnectedness—between the human and nonhuman, ancestors and ourselves—from U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón.
    • Poetry
      Michael Kleber-Diggs

      Winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, the poems of Worldly Things offer needed guidance on ways forward—toward radical kindness and a socially responsible poetics.

    • Poetry
      Jackson Holbert

      Winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, Jackson Holbert’s Winter Stranger is a solemn record of addiction and the divided affections we hold for the landscapes that shape us.

    • Poetry
      Ryann Stevenson

      Winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, Ryann Stevenson’s Human Resources is a sobering and perceptive portrait of technology’s impact on connection and power.

    • Poetry
      Kathy Fagan

      A 2023 Guggenheim Fellow
      A Ohiana Award Finalist in Poetry
      A Williams Carlos Williams Award Recipient

      From Kingsley Tufts Award finalist Kathy Fagan comes Bad Hobby, a perceptive collection focused on memory, class, and might-have-beens.

    • Fiction
      Deni Ellis Béchard

      Assigned to write an exposé on one of the most elusive and corrupt figures in the conservation world, a journalist finds himself on a plane to the Congo. His harrowing search leads him into an underground network of sinners and saints.

    • Nonfiction
      Deni Ellis Béchard

      When young Deni’s mother leaves his charismatic father, the boy learns of his father’s true identity: André Béchard was once a bank robber—and so Deni’s imagination is set on fire. This deeply affecting memoir is at once a highly unconventional…

      • Fiction
        Debra Magpie Earling

        Bold, passionate, and more urgent than ever, Debra Magpie Earling’s powerful classic novel is reborn in this new edition.

      • Fiction
        Diane Wilson

        A haunting novel spanning several generations, following a Dakota family’s struggle to preserve their way of life and their sacrifices to protect what matters most.

      • Poetry
        Sasha taqwšəblu LaPointe

        A wild, seductive debut collection that presents a powerful journey of struggle and healing—and a spellbinding brew of folklore, movies, music, and ritual.

      • Fiction
        Richard Wagamese

        Alone in the world and placed in a horrific boarding school, Saul Indian Horse is surrounded by violence and cruelty, but finds a tentative salvation in hockey.

      • Nonfiction
        Darrel J. McLeod

        Thrillingly written in a series of fractured vignettes, and unflinchingly honest, Mamaskatch is a heartbreaking account of how traumas are passed down from one generation to the next.

      • Nonfiction
        Darrel J. McLeod

        Following his award-winning debut memoir, Mamaskatch, which masterfully portrayed a Cree coming-of-age in rural Canada, Darrel J. McLeod continues the poignant story of his adulthood.

      • Poetry
        Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley

        From the intersection of Onondaga, Japanese, Cuban, and Appalachian cultures, this collection arrives brimming with personal and political histories.

      • Fiction
        Richard Wagamese

        After suffering a devastating accident, rodeo cowboy Joe Willie Wolfchild retires to his family’s ranch to mend. There he meets Aiden, a troubled city teenager, and Claire, his mother—and three damaged people slowly begin to heal together.

      • Fiction
        Richard Wagamese

        When sixteen-year-old Franklin Starlight is summoned by his ailing father, Eldon, Franklin’s sense of duty clashes with the resentment he feels for his father’s many years of neglect and drinking. But when the two men set out together on one last…

      • Poetry
        Michael Bazzett

        By turns poetic and lucid, sinuous and accessible, this verse translation of the Mayan epic—the first of its kind, and the first in the Seedbank series—breathes new life into an essential tale.

      • Fiction
        Susan Power

        These stories evoke a world in which spirits and the living commingle and Sioux culture and modern life collide with disarming power, humor, and joy. The characters grapple with potent forces of family, history, and belief—forces that at times dare…

      • Fiction
        Eric Gansworth

        After a moment of kindness turns tragic, Tommy Jack McMorsey is forced to revisit his past: the horrors of Vietnam, a love affair, and the suicide of his closest friend. Exploring the ways images, stereotypes, and depictions of identity intersect…

      • Fiction
        Galsan Tschinag

        Rooted in the oral traditions of the Tuvan people, the first novel in Galsan Tschinag’s saga—reissued as a Seedbank title—weaves the timeless story of a boy poised on the cusp of manhood with the tale of a people’s vanishing way of life.

      • Nonfiction
        Joseph Bruchac

        This colorful memoir traces the author’s path from “nature nut” to jock to writer, to his home at the end of Ridge Road near where he was raised by his grandparents. Just as essentially, it explores the links between his native Abenaki culture and…

        • Poetry
          Yalie Saweda Kamara

          Yalie Saweda Kamara’s Besaydoo is an elegantly wrought love song to home—as place, as people, as body, and as language. Yalie Saweda Kamara writes for a new America, where praise is plentiful and Black lives flourish.

        • Poetry
          JJJJJerome Ellis

          A polyphonic new entry in Multiverse, JJJJJerome Ellis’s Aster of Ceremonies beautifully rewrites history, creating a world that blooms backward, reimagining what it means for Black and disabled people to have taken, and to continue to take, their

        • Poetry
          Ama Codjoe

          Ama Codjoe’s highly anticipated debut collection brings generous light to the inner dialogues of women as they bathe, create art, make and lose love. Each poem rises with the urgency of a fully awakened sensual life.

        • Poetry
          Michael Kleber-Diggs

          Winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, the poems of Worldly Things offer needed guidance on ways forward—toward radical kindness and a socially responsible poetics.

        • Nonfiction
          J. Drew Lanham

          This memoir is a riveting exploration of the contradictions of Black identity in the rural South, asking what it means to be “the rare bird, the oddity.”

        • Nonfiction
          Antonio Michael Downing

          Tracing the author’s journey from the tropical forests of Trinidad to the stark landscape of rural Canada—as well as that of his personal, musical metamorphosis—this is a poignant memoir of overcoming and belonging.

        • Poetry
          Sean Hill

          From the Bahamas, London, and Cairo, to Minnesota and Georgia—and from the intimate messages of the heart to the global immigration of African Americans—these poems explore with urgency the relationships among travel, alienation, and home. Part…

        • Nonfiction
          Alison Hawthorne Deming and Lauret Savoy

          For centuries, the richness of our world’s diverse stories has been widely overlooked by readers of environmental literature. This collection works against this blind spot, exploring the relationship between culture and place, emphasizing the lasting…

        • Poetry
          Parneshia Jones

          Affectionate, dynamic, and uncommonly observant, this collection mines the richness of history to create a map of identity and influence. In the South, “lard sizzles a sermon from the stove”; in Chicago, we feast on an “opera of peppers and pimento”…

        • Nonfiction
          Annick Smith and Susan O’Connor

          A multicultural anthology about the enduring importance and shifting associations of the hearth in our world.

        • Nonfiction
          Alexandra Manglis and Kristen Case

          21|19 offers a re-reading of the “American Renaissance” and new possibilities for imaginative critical practice today.

          • Poetry
            Jos Charles

            This National Poetry Series winner defiantly makes space for bodies that have been historically denied their own vocabulary. These poems stake a claim on the language available to speak about trans experience.

          • Poetry
            Jennifer Huang

            Selected by Jos Charles as the winner of the Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry, Return Flight is a lush reckoning: with inheritance, with body, with trauma, with desire—and with the many tendons in between.

          • Nonfiction
            Juliet Patterson

            A sublimely elegant, fractured reckoning with the legacy and inheritance of suicide in one American family.

          • Nonfiction
            Darrel J. McLeod

            Thrillingly written in a series of fractured vignettes, and unflinchingly honest, Mamaskatch is a heartbreaking account of how traumas are passed down from one generation to the next.

          • Nonfiction
            Darrel J. McLeod

            Following his award-winning debut memoir, Mamaskatch, which masterfully portrayed a Cree coming-of-age in rural Canada, Darrel J. McLeod continues the poignant story of his adulthood.

          • Poetry
            Ava Nathaniel Winter
            An excavatory collection of poems tracing the connections between Jewish transfemininity, queer desire, and cultural histories.
          • Poetry
            Kathy Fagan

            A 2023 Guggenheim Fellow
            A Ohiana Award Finalist in Poetry
            A Williams Carlos Williams Award Recipient

            From Kingsley Tufts Award finalist Kathy Fagan comes Bad Hobby, a perceptive collection focused on memory, class, and might-have-beens.

          • Nonfiction
            Kazim Ali

            In building relationships with his former neighbors, Ali explores questions of land and power―and in remembering a lost connection to this place, finally finds a home he might belong to.

          • Poetry
            Lee Ann Roripaugh

            Heian-period Japanese women writers, science fiction, and the author’s own experience as a second-generation immigrant: these are some of the sources these poems use to explore the connection between identity and language. Wonderfully lyrical and…

          • Poetry
            Rick Barot

            In The Galleons, Rick Barot widens his scope, contextualizing the immigrant journey of his Filipino-American family in the larger history and aftermath of colonialism.

          • Poetry
            Kathy Fagan

            The language of trees is the language of love and loss: in this collection, black walnuts fall where no one can eat or smell them, and cottonwood sends out feverish signals of pollen. And like the bark of the sycamore, which sheds to allow the tree’s…

          • Nonfiction
            Alexandra Manglis and Kristen Case

            21|19 offers a re-reading of the “American Renaissance” and new possibilities for imaginative critical practice today.

          • Poetry
            Melissa Kwasny

            Inspired by ancient pictograph and petroglyph sites, this collection captures the intersection of the natural world and sacred art. These poems fill this space with new, personal meaning: brief glimpses of starlight suggest the impermanence of life…

          • Poetry
            Melissa Kwasny

            In these exquisitely crafted prose poems, image collides with image to produce a singular ecological and poetic vision. Touching on mortality, temporality, and eternity, this collection asks the reader: how do we tie ourselves to the world when our…

          • Poetry
            Melissa Kwasny

            Drawing inspiration from Novalis, a poet who believed in the correspondence between inner and outer worlds, this collection divines the palpable and ineffable ways in which inherited traditions—indigenous culture, mythology, romanticism, modernism…

          • Poetry
            Sally Keith

            These are poems of absence, written in the wake of terrible loss. Addressing death, art, travel, and beauty—assembling a guide to survival in the face of the seemingly insurmountable—this collection finds, in mourning, what it means to survive.

          • Poetry
            Marilyn Hacker and Karthika Naïr

            Poets and friends Marilyn Hacker and Karthika Naïr—living mere miles from each other but separated by lockdown, and inspired by this extraordinary time—began a correspondence in verse.

            • Nonfiction
              Kerri ní Dochartaigh

              In Thin Places, a luminous blend of memoir, history, and nature writing, Kerri ní Dochartaigh explores how nature kept her sane and helped her heal after The Troubles.

            • Nonfiction
              Chris Dombrowski

              Spending time in wild places with their children, Chris Dombrowski learns that their youthful sense of wonder at the beauty and connectivity of the more-than-human world is not naivete to be shed, but rather wisdom most of us lose along the way

            • Nonfiction
              John Cotter

              A Best Book of the Year at The Vulture

              A devastating memoir that sheds urgent, bracingly honest light on both the taboos surrounding disability and the limits of medical science.

            • Nonfiction
              Antonio Michael Downing

              Tracing the author’s journey from the tropical forests of Trinidad to the stark landscape of rural Canada—as well as that of his personal, musical metamorphosis—this is a poignant memoir of overcoming and belonging.

            • Nonfiction
              Kazim Ali

              In building relationships with his former neighbors, Ali explores questions of land and power―and in remembering a lost connection to this place, finally finds a home he might belong to.

            • Nonfiction
              J. Drew Lanham

              This memoir is a riveting exploration of the contradictions of Black identity in the rural South, asking what it means to be “the rare bird, the oddity.”

            • Nonfiction
              Darrel J. McLeod

              Thrillingly written in a series of fractured vignettes, and unflinchingly honest, Mamaskatch is a heartbreaking account of how traumas are passed down from one generation to the next.

            • Nonfiction
              Darrel J. McLeod

              Following his award-winning debut memoir, Mamaskatch, which masterfully portrayed a Cree coming-of-age in rural Canada, Darrel J. McLeod continues the poignant story of his adulthood.

            • Nonfiction
              Gregory Orr

              Orr articulates his journey in language as lyrical as it is authentic, gifting us all with a singular tale of survival, and of the transformation of suffering into art.

            • Nonfiction
              Beth Dooley
              Beth Dooley arrived in Minnesota from New Jersey with preconceptions about the Midwestern food scene. Having learned to cook in her grandmother’s kitchen, shopping at farm stands and making preserves, she couldn’t help but wonder, “Do people here…
            • Nonfiction
              Deni Ellis Béchard

              When young Deni’s mother leaves his charismatic father, the boy learns of his father’s true identity: André Béchard was once a bank robber—and so Deni’s imagination is set on fire. This deeply affecting memoir is at once a highly unconventional…

            • Nonfiction
              Tim Winton

              In this beautiful, evocative, and sometimes provocative memoir, Tim Winton explores Australia’s unique landscape, and how that singular place has shaped him and his writing.