Category: Natural History

WVU Press Steps UP for the environment: spotlight on Salvaging the Anthropocene Series

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When Stephanie Foote was the Jackson and Nichols Professor of English at West Virginia University, she was moved to create a book series for environmental humanities scholarship and in 2017, the Salvaging the Anthropocene Series was announced with West Virginia University Press. Its objective – books about daily intellectual, artistic, social, and aesthetic responses to global environmental degradation through transformative practices rather than simply managing despair. Foote called for works on and for a broad range of social actors from artists and designers to knitters and activists.Read More »

A Conversation with Isaac Yuen

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We are thrilled to be publishing this captivating debut essay collection by Isaac Yuen ­– a celebration, through wordplay and earthplay, of our planet’s riotous wonders. Utter, Earth features odes to sloths, tributes to trilobites, and ringing endorsements for lichen. For animal lovers and readers of Brian Doyle, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, and Amy Leach, each essay of this one-of-a-kind collection combines joyous language, whimsical tangents, and scientific findings to remind us of and reconnect us with those to whom we are inextricably bound. Caitlin Solano recently spoke with the author for this Q&A for Booktimist.

How did some of your essays that were previously published end up coming together as a book?

I think there is a common voice running through the essays in the collection. The narrator who’s mulling over which creatures to invite to their next party is the one who’s trying to justify why sometimes it’s good to give up on dreams is also the one figuring out how to write stories with animal verbiage.

There’s an odd, rambling, flighty mind at work behind it all—a mind that is me but also not me—attempting to chart some type of internal cartography (or a menagerie, as they might put it) through a tangle of creature contacts and connections.

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