Craft Lecture: Writing Climate Crisis

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Zell Visiting Writers Series craft lectures are free and open to the public, and will be offered both virtually (via Zoom) and in person (in Angell Hall #3154). Seats at the in-person events are capacity-limited and offered on a first come, first served basis; please arrive early to secure a spot. Please contact kotziers@umich.edu with any questions or accommodation needs.


This craft lecture will lay out just a few of the craft problems that face those of us who write about climate crisis – including dramatic shifts in scale, data-heavy research, polemic, anthropocentric melodrama, and the risk of abstracting a crisis global in scale. It will also propose some ways to address and counter these craft problems – which are also conceptual issues with serious political implications – without over-simplifying or ignoring the consequences of each solution.

Critically acclaimed poet Brian Teare writes from the intersection of environmental thought, queer experience, and disability. His most recent book, Doomstead Days, offers a series of walking meditations on our complicity with the climate crisis, poems that document the interdependence of human and environmental health by using fieldwork and archival research to situate embodiment and chronic illness within bioregional and industrial histories. As the New York Times noted, “Teare’s voices let us weigh the insoluble questions of how to live as an ethical being in the face of violence and environmental collapse.” Doomstead Days won the 2020 Four Quartets Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle, Kingsley Tufts, and Lambda Literary Awards.

A 2020 Guggenheim fellow, Teare is the author of five previous books, including Companion Grasses and The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven. His honors include the Brittingham Prize and Lambda Literary and Publishing Triangle Awards, as well as fellowships from the NEA, the Pew Foundation, the American Antiquarian Society, and the MacDowell Colony. Teare has a BA in English and Creative Writing from the University of Alabama, an MFA from Indiana University, and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. He taught creative writing in the San Francisco Bay Area for over a decade before moving to Philadelphia, where he taught at Temple University. Now an Associate Professor of Poetry at the University of Virginia, he lives in Charlottesville, where he makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books.

For any questions about the event or to share accommodation needs, please email kotziers@umich.edu-- we are eager to help ensure that this event is inclusive to you. The building, event space, and restrooms are wheelchair accessible. A lactation room (Angell Hall #5209), reflection room (Haven Hall #1506), and gender-inclusive restroom (Angell Hall 5th floor) are available on site. ASL interpreters and CART services at in-person events are available upon request; please email kotziers@umich.edu at least two weeks prior to the event, whenever possible, to allow time to arrange services.

U-M employees with a U-M parking permit may use the Church Street Parking Structure (525 Church St., Ann Arbor) or the Thompson Parking Structure (500 Thompson St., Ann Arbor). There is limited metered street parking on State Street and South University Avenue. The Forest Avenue Public Parking Structure (650 South Forest Ave., Ann Arbor) is five blocks away, and the parking rate is $1.20 per hour. All of these options include parking spots for individuals with disabilities.