Gretchen E. Henderson | 2023 May/September
|
Gretchen Ernster Henderson (MFA, PhD) is an intermedia writer who cross-pollinates environmental arts, cultural histories, integrative sciences, and social practices. She is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin and has also taught on the faculties at Georgetown, University of Utah, and MIT, along with community settings, currently including the Oak Spring Garden Foundation in Virginia and the University of Arizona Poetry Center. Her fifth book, Life in the Tar Seeps: A Spiraling Ecology from a Dying Sea (Trinity University Press 2023), grew from her 2017–19 Annie Clark Tanner Fellowship in Environmental Humanities at the University of Utah, with digital tributaries seeping across publications and performances, exhibitions, and field practices (including this ecocinema from 2021). Some of her recent publications include Ecotone (Notable in Best American Essays 2020), Orion, Kenyan Review, Ploughshares, LA+/Landscape Architecture Plus, and her last book was translated across five languages. She frequently collaborates with artists and scientists, including an opera libretto on the climate crisis that premiered at MIT to co-authored articles in Nature Sustainability and Conservation Biology.
Gretchen was deeply grateful to spend time at Mi Casita in Tres Piedras as the 2023 Aldo & Estella Leopold Writer in Residence in New Mexico, which included her talk on "Renewable Land Ethics through Land Arts" at the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos. She first read Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac as an undergraduate at Princeton and is interested in how creative practices and aesthetic engagements can contribute to collaborative approaches to environmental stewardship and planetary healing. Born and raised near the Pacific Ocean, among many watersheds, Gretchen is now indebted to the Colorado River in the Sonoran Desert, where she lives with her family and is undertaking a poetic water-harvesting project (with the University of Arizona Poetry Center) called Dear Body of Water
( https://dearbodyofwater.poetsforscience.org/) inviting people to write love letters to bodies of water, turning rhetorics of fear to care--please join the global chorus! A few links:
Website: gretchenhenderson.com |
