Barrington Public Library
281 County Road
Barrington, RI 02806
United States
Free and open to the public. Registration Required
Join Barrington Public Library as they welcome the author of this year’s Reading Across Rhode Island selection, Elizabeth Rush. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore is her highly original work of lyric reportage and a haunting meditation on how to let go of the places we love.
With every passing day, and every record-breaking hurricane, it grows clearer that climate change is neither imagined nor distant—and that rising seas are transforming the coastline of the United States in irrevocable ways. In Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore, Elizabeth Rush guides readers through some of the places where this change has been most dramatic, 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 testimonials 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 these vulnerable communities, Rising privileges the voices of those too often kept at the margins.
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 writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, among others. She received her MFA in nonfiction from Southern New Hampshire University, and teaches creative nonfiction at Brown University.
Books will be available for sale and signing from Inkfish Books. To reserve a copy for purchase the night of the event, please email Lisa from Inkfish Books at info@inkfishbooks.com or call 401-368-6827.
Space is limited. Free and open to all with an Eventbrite ticket.
Elizabeth Rush
Elizabeth Rush is the author of The Quickening: Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth and Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Rising weaves the firsthand accounts of those who are living through sea level rise today with eyewitness reporting from our shoreline’s disappearing places.