Reading Lists

29 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.

    • 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
              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
              Ada Limón

              A 2025 National Endowment for the Arts Big Reads Selection
              A 2024 NPR “Books We Love” Selection

              Published in association with the Library of Congress and edited by the twenty-fourth Poet Laureate of the United States, a singular collection of fifty

            • 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.

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

              A 2025 National Endowment for the Arts Big Reads Selection
              A 2024 NPR “Books We Love” Selection

              Published in association with the Library of Congress and edited by the twenty-fourth Poet Laureate of the United States, a singular collection of fifty

            • 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
              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
              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
              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.

            • 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.