Climate Justice Fiction: Movement Building for the Win
by Aya de Leon, plus Nicola Penfold and Catherine Bush discuss the natural world
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For decades, science fiction and fantasy writers have been warning us about the type of future we may face if we don't transform our current society. In the past five years, Octavia Butler's 1993 Parable of the Sower has felt particularly prophetic, because she predicted 2024 with a changed climate, greater income inequality, widespread privatization, and an authoritarian leader who pledged to "Make America Great Again."
Sci-fi and fantasy climate fiction is a rich body of literature in which some writers include myth, magical powers, and fantastical elements and others lean more on the science. Whatever the case, these authors have been writing nearly half a century of cautionary tales to warn us of what may happen if we don't change our practices of toxic pollution, environmental racism, burning fossil fuels, extractive industries, and exploiting the earth for maximum profit.
These dangerous practices have brought us to the point of complete consensus among scientists, authors of science NON-fiction, that our actions have changed the climate. Scientists have given us a deadline to change these practices, lest we damage the climate so much that the planet may not be fit for human habitation.
The facts are scary. Some people have just given up. Many say we're doomed. But we're not. To be clear, there is a ticking clock, but averting these large scale climate disasters is TOTALLY POSSIBLE. Their challenge to us is to act now, particularly those of us in the US. The United States is disproportionately responsible for carbon emissions and is in a highly strategic position to take global leadership in ending the crisis. Unfortunately, our economy is so wrapped up in profit-making and corporate interests hold much sway in our political system, that many of our political leaders are unwilling to make the tough choices and big changes that are required to address the climate emergency at scale.
But if our leaders won't use their power to do it, we need to build our power to make it happen. To be clear, it's no longer about our consumer choices: using solar, buying a hybrid car, going vegan, recycling or composting. We need massive political and economic policy changes at the national and international level, to transform the entire system of how our lives are fueled and organized worldwide, to get us to zero emissions. In order to achieve this, we need to build the movement that can put the necessary pressure on our leaders to make that happen. And it won't be easy.
Which is why I want to invite authors to write about THIS MOMENT. To the science fiction and fantasy writers who have been carrying the torch in climate fiction for all these decades: thank you. And keep up the good work. But for the rest of us, writers of contemporary fiction, it's time for us to start doing our part.
In 2017, when Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, I was writing feminist heist fiction. I have roots in various parts of the African Diaspora, including Puerto Rico, and I was devastated. I was working on my fourth novel in a series, and asked my editor for permission to change topics to write about the hurricane. My publisher, Kensington, offers two-book contracts, and the second book is generally unspecified. This was one of those unspecified books, and I was able to pivot quickly. So my first novel of climate fiction, SIDE CHICK NATION (2019), came out less than two years after Hurricane Maria.
If I could go back and edit some of the book, I would. I'd include a lot more of the concepts from the first two paragraphs of this essay, because now, after several years of climate activism, I have a much clearer picture of what is needed in the climate movement today. But I feel incredibly proud of my work in that novel, because I took action. I didn't wait to do it perfectly. I felt racked with impostor syndrome. Who was I to be the first novelist to publish a book about this massive disaster. I didn't feel like I knew enough, or that I was Puerto Rican enough. And would people think I was somehow disrespecting the tragedy by writing about it in the context of popular fiction? A heist/romance series? But I didn't let those fears stop me. I decided that this was my opportunity to make a contribution, and that I would just do the best I could.
That novel started what has now become my wheelhouse in climate fiction: stories of everyday people who have no intention of becoming active in the movement for climate justice, who get politicized by events happening around them, and who decide to take a stand. I used this same character arc in my 2020 novel A SPY IN THE STRUGGLE. I had been working on this novel for decades--since my 20s. I had originally been writing about FBI infiltration of a racial justice organization. It wasn't that much of a stretch to make it a racial and climate justice organization. This novel had more of my developing climate justice analysis, and more movement building.
Ultimately, the climate crisis caused a deep reorganization of my priorities. I decided to put climate in the center of all areas of my life. As a working mom who taught college and wrote novels, I didn't have time to drop everything and become a full-time climate activist. But I decided to center climate in everything I was already doing. If I was a poetry teacher, I would teach young poets to write about climate. If I was a novelist, I would write novels about climate. If I was parenting, I would find ways to center climate justice activism in my parenting (shoutout to Mary DeMocker, author of The Parents’ Guide to Climate Revolution: 100 Ways to Build a Fossil-Free Future, Raise Empowered Kids and Still Get a Good Night’s Sleep. I also started a multi-genre climate blog with several other women writers as a place for people to come to find writing about people choosing to face this emergency from a perspective that we do have the power to turn the situation around.
Recently, climate activists have been pointing out the following statistic: 3.5%. Historically, any time 3.5% of the population becomes active in a non-violent movement, it has ALWAYS led to change. So we don't need EVERYONE to agree to take climate action. We're just aiming for that 3.5%. This number gives me great hope.
So I became determined to do my part to get us to 3.5%. As a fiction author, I continued to write adult thrillers about characters who became politicized by the climate crisis. And I wasn't the only author doing so. In 2020, I read Natalia Sylvester's young adult novel RUNNING, about the daughter of a presidential candidate who becomes disillusioned with her father's environmental policies as a senator in Florida. I LOVED this book and I wanted to emulate it.
So in December 2020, I began writing THE MYSTERY WOMAN IN ROOM THREE, about two undocumented Dominican teens in Florida who uncover a senate kidnapping plot to stop the Green New Deal (GND). The GND policy framework, first introduced into congress by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ed Markey in 2019, calls for sweeping public policy to address the climate emergency along with achieving other social aims like job creation and reducing economic inequality in order to move quickly to zero carbon emissions. The name refers back to FDR's New Deal in response to the Great Depression.
It felt really timely to publish this GND novel during 2021--the first year of the Biden administration, now that we had flipped the senate. However, I faced the challenge that I wasn't under contract for this book. Around that same time, I had just sold my first YA novel, and it wasn't going to come out for 2-3 years. The climate crisis is increasingly urgent. This newly inspired novel was intended to publicize the Green New Deal as the type of solution required for the climate crisis. It wouldn't do to have it published in 2023. So I decided to look for an online outlet who would publish it serially. I partnered with one outlet, and we had a deal set up. The contract was on my agent's desk. But then a new senior editor took over and decided they didn't have capacity for the project. I was back to square one.
At the same time, I had a new climate justice novel for adults, a love triangle between a naive young woman, a fossil fuel mogul and a climate activist. Ultimately, she begins to spy on her mogul boyfriend for the movement. I was hoping to sell this book to a Big 5 publishing house. I had been working with an independent publisher, and my advances were small. I had done better financially with the YA. I was hoping to level up with my adult books as well.
Like many authors, the dream is to write full time. And it seemed like it would come true! A Big 5 editor wanted my adult book, and we had a great phone conversation. Unfortunately, she got back to me that while she loved it, the higher ups at her press couldn't see it for their list. I got this bad news within two weeks of losing the serial publication. I had two new climate books that I loved, and no place to publish them. I was so discouraged. If I couldn't find publishers for these books soon, they would no longer be politically relevant. Worst case, they might not be publishable at all. I sank into a funk for weeks.
I was particularly discouraged because--SPOILER ALERT--both of these books included visions of our climate movements winning. And not just happy endings for the protagonists involved. THE MYSTERY WOMAN IN ROOM THREE ends with (SERIOUS SPOILER) the senate passing the Green New Deal. Yes, I know it's not realistic that two teens will change the course of the climate crisis. But they don't act alone. They work with the Sunrise Movement and become a tipping point for climate justice, where the will of the people is finally implemented by our leaders. In reality, very few people profit from the system that is causing global warming, but those who do have disproportionate power and influence. These books are creating a new story to pair with our abundant dystopian literature: we have many cautionary tales for what will happen if we don't act in a timely fashion. My contemporary books are roadmaps to winning if we DO take collective action NOW.
Our fight against the climate crisis demands resiliency and commitment. I couldn't let the publishing disappointments get me down. I just kept trying. I changed my strategy. I edited the adult novel and pitched it to my independent publishing house. I continued to reach out to everyone I could to try to find a serial publisher for the YA novel. And after months of hustling, both books were picked up. Orion Magazine serialized THE MYSTERY WOMAN IN ROOM THREE in fall 2021, and the other book (not yet titled) will be published by Kensington in 2022/23.
I was incredibly relieved and I had learned a very important lesson: writing urgent political fiction is much more stressful if you don't have your work under contract. I vowed not to make that mistake again.
So I continue with my strategy to infuse climate into my novels, however I can. In December 2021, my latest book came out QUEEN OF URBAN PROPHECY. It's about a young starlet rapper who faces unexpected public scrutiny when she releases a song about a girl shot by police after school, and a girl with the same name gets killed by police under those circumstances. Again, I'm working with this accidental activist character arc. But given my activist commitments, I had to find the opportunities to work climate justice into the narrative. These opportunities proved to be quite abundant. The book is largely a romance that takes place on a the bus of the rapper's national tour. I decided to make her love interest (a DJ) a Puerto Rican guy who lost family in Hurricane Maria. As she travels across the coutnry, there were opportunities for her to confront past tragedies like Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, as well as current crises like heatwaves, floods, and droughts. As she takes small steps towards activism, other activists contact her and urge her to get more involved in both the movement for climate justice and the movement against police violence.
My latest project is a work-for-hire. Like many genre writers, I got tapped to write for an entertainment franchise. My current goal is to get them to approve a plot that centers on the climate crisis. If I'm successful, this will definitely be my largest platform yet. Stay tuned!
I share all of this about my own journey because it is my hope that we can build a here-and-now brand of climate justice fiction. This body of literature could become a wonderful companion to the flourishing what-can-happen-if-we-don't-act brand of climate fiction in sci-fi/fantasy. I invite all of my contemporary writer colleagues to consider getting involved in climate justice fiction, and helping visualize a world where we fight and we win.
Find out more about Aya’s latest novel, Queen of Urban Prophecy, or read her serialised YA novel The Mystery Woman in Room Three.
Aya de León teaches creative writing at UC Berkeley. Kensington Books publishes her novels for adults, including her award-winning "Justice Hustlers" feminist heist series. An alumna of Cave Canem and VONA, Aya is currently working on a memoir of her body that explores the intersection of food, body image, race, and the environment. In March/April, she is organizing an online conference entitled BLACK LITERATURE VS. THE CLIMATE EMERGENCY (exact date TBA). Finally, her Justice Hustlers series has been optioned for television, and she is currently working on the pilot. Find her at ayadeleon.com
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The wonderful recovery of the natural world
Catherine Bush and Nicola Penfold discuss their novels, which focus on wild nature.
Catherine: Nicola, one of the things I loved so much about entering your upper MG novel Between Sea and Sky was feeling uncanny resonances to my novel, Blaze Island, written for older readers yet with young adult protagonists and being released in the UK and US this spring.
At moments I felt like your platform island, built of lashed-together boats on a bay that reminded me of Morecambe Bay in the northwest of England, was on one side of the Atlantic while my wild and wind-swept Blaze Island, off the coast of Newfoundland, lay in a parallel world on the other side of the ocean.
Both novels feature resolute and protective daughters who live with their grief-stricken fathers and don’t want to leave their islands. In my novel the climate scientist father has forbidden his teenaged daughter from leaving Blaze Island. In the futuristic world of your novel, one daughter longs to take off for a life on the mainland, the other passionately resists. Both will find their lives transformed.
Fathers teach their daughters about the natural world in both novels. In Between Sea and Sky a boy arrives on Pearl and Clover’s rigged-together sea farm bearing a secret, in mine a young man tumbles through Miranda’s door in the midst of a violent storm, hiding his true identity. Both our novels gesture to Shakespeare’s The Tempest – how could you not in stories of young women living with fathers on islands?
Climate-engineering science becomes a kind of magic in my novel. And when I came upon the greenhouse, which plays a key role in your novel, as a greenhouse does in mine, my mind felt a bit blown. I was immersed in your story, by your characters, who move with such energy and vitality. And though the future world that you describe felt bleak, you also invite the reader to be beautifully and tenderly transported into wonder.
Nicola: Catherine, hello! Thanks so much! This honestly feels like such a great pairing, doesn’t it? My mind was blown in that section of Blaze Island when the storm brings in old treasures – sections of clay pipe, fragments of pottery, seaglass. Mudlarking is such a big thing for my characters. And then the use of seaweed as a carbon sink too. Our worlds have so much in common, and yes, The Tempest of course. How indeed could we not?! I love referring to other stories – I think it can give extra weight to a novel.
Blaze Island was such a seductive a setting for me. I love remote places, and characters living on the edge of society, and it felt so fitting that this was the kind of place Miranda’s father would seek refuge in, after he was cast out by climate deniers. But I was impressed with how reports from the outside world still came in, and that sense of ever worsening climate catastrophe – hurricanes, blizzards, intolerable heatwaves, forest fires, a brown sea surging through Manhattan subway stations, icebergs dying in the bay… It was genuinely terrifying, all the more so because these things are of course real. And there’s such a sense that Blaze Island won’t be a refuge for long: the bad weather is coming in.
Catherine: Yes, the bad weather is definitely coming in, and I wanted that realism. Blaze Island isn’t futuristic, it’s an alternate now. Between Sea and Sky is your second speculative, environmentally themed novel for young readers. In your first, When the World Turns Wild, two children escape from a walled city that has shut itself off from the natural world after a deadly virus released by eco-activists runs rampant, a plot that given our pandemic reality sends eerie shivers down my spine. Can you describe the spark that began Between Sea and Sky and were you writing the novel during the pandemic?
Nicola: Yes, I was writing this in the pandemic. I’d already agreed to the premise with my editor, but it was written in the UK’s first COVID lockdown. This definitely impacted my writing. It was the first time I’d lived through a period of such tight rules and regulations, and this helped build the claustrophobia of my fictional world, the loss of freedom. Then because it’s a sea novel, and I live in London and was feeling very landlocked, all my love and longing for the sea poured out into this book. It didn’t feel like it at the time, but in retrospect, I’m really grateful I had it to write!
Were you writing in the first lockdowns too? How did this influence your writing?
Catherine: I released Blaze Island in Canada during the first year of the pandemic. I spent those early months of lockdown on my own in the country not really knowing what was going to happen with the book’s publication, which was agonizing. Collectively everyone was trying to figure out how to publish during a pandemic and make the transition to online events. I was really preoccupied with that.
I found myself thinking that even though Blaze Island was written before the pandemic, there are all sorts of correspondences between Miranda’s isolated life on an island that she can’t, or won’t, leave and our lockdown lives, which left most of us feeling as if we were living on our own version of an island. So I spent time writing about this condition of feeling ‘islanded’ by the pandemic, our need to cultivate self-reliance amid isolation, and I produced a short film called “We Are Islands,” in collaboration with an experimental filmmaker and two artists from Fogo Island, the magical place that inspired my fictional Blaze Island. Like you, I’ve been haunted by the fact that I can’t get to the sea, especially because my next novel is also a sea novel. On this continent, the ocean is over a thousand kilometres from me. All these months later, I’m still dreaming!
Nicola, would you describe the future world that you create — in which the earth is poisoned, much of the UK has flooded, families live under intense social surveillance by a Central Government, grow their food in vertical towers, and are only permitted one child — as dystopic?
Nicola: Yes, absolutely. Like my first book, this is a dystopia, but with light and hope, which is important I think, for the age I write for. In my first book, Where the World Turns Wild, the characters leave the dystopic city behind, and head out to the wild. Here too, my characters quickly escape: on land, Nat and his friends explore the forbidden fields of solar panels, where nature is returning; at sea, the sisters live outside of the rules, they’ve run away from them. This is rather like Miranda and her father have run to Blaze Island in your book. They’ve left the real world behind. Actually, I’m really interested to know, how long have you wanted to write an island story? An island is a compelling setting for a writer, huh?! I almost got there with my offshore oyster farm in Between Sea and Sky, but I think I still have an island story inside me to tell!
Catherine: Oh, please write an island story. I’m already eager to read it. I will say that the makeshift island of Between Sea and Sky feels like an island – and, yes, I’ve long wanted to write an island story. In the midst of all that early pandemic isolation, I found myself thinking back to the island literature I loved as a child. Ursula LeGuin’s Earthsea trilogy. Scott O’Dell’s Island of the Blue Dolphins, a classic from my youth, about a young indigenous woman left behind on an island off the California coast who learns to survive on her own while befriending a wolf. Islands are magical in part because they’re microcosms of the world. Maybe that’s why writers love them. In climate terms, island thinking is so crucial, isn’t it – because ultimately, we all live on a planetary island.
I’m curious -- how do you create a world that might compel us to recognize the threats to our familiar lives but doesn’t terrify or depress young readers? I’ve been thinking recently about the place of dystopias in climate literature. In Blaze Island I try to stay close to an elastic realism, containing nothing that couldn’t or isn’t happening now – a massive hurricane barrelling up the east coast of North America, melting Arctic ice, research into climate engineering. What appeals to you about creating a speculative future in which we can see traces of our own world?
Nicola: It's definitely that relatability. Mudlarking was a great way of weaving this in actually. Sisters Pearl and Clover find washed up toys, jewellery, crisp packets…familiar things to my readers. I wanted to reach across to them from the future world. But you’re so right, not completely terrifying and depressing readers, particularly young readers, is important! I was very conscious of this, and it felt a fine tightrope to walk – how to include enough of the climate emergency to do justice to what a huge thing it is in all our lives, but not to make readers despair. For me, the natural world is always the answer, and particularly natural climate solutions. In my first book the focus was very much on rewilding, and in Between Sea and Sky, it’s rewilding too, but this time of the seas. People retreating has given nature space to recover.
Catherine: Attention to nature feels key to both your novels and this was certainly essential to me when evoking the world of Blaze Island in which Miranda and her father, and Caleb and his mother, live very close to the land. I spent eight years returning to the actual Fogo Island for research, talking to people in its communities, living near to sea and wind. In Between Sea and Sky, I felt transported into a watery zone where nature seems on the verge of recovering from human ravages. Porpoises swim in the bay. You invite young readers to notice, really notice, the living world beyond the human.
As the novel opens, mainlander Nat discovers some small crawling creatures munching on the leaves of a plant. At first, like Nat, I had no idea what they were. You do a brilliant job creating suspense out of whether the caterpillars will survive long enough to pupate into butterflies. Perhaps there’s metaphor here, but above all there’s ardour in the way we are invited to pay attention to the natural world through your characters’ care and noticing. Can you talk about this aspect of your writing and why it feels so important?
Nicola: I loved the nature on Blaze Island! It was as alive as the characters for me. I especially loved how Miranda has been raised alongside it, how she names berries, lichens, flowers, birds. She knows the direction of the wind. She can read the clouds. She makes bread and fire. It was beautifully done. For me, reading your book, which is essentially of course a story of growing climate disaster, the natural world was the space and the light and the hope. You got the balance just right, and this is absolutely why I include nature too. I mean practically all the solutions to the climate crisis that make any sense involve nature.
I don’t want to preach or be didactic, first and foremost I’m telling stories, but I do consciously want to promote a connection with nature. A relationship with the natural world is a huge gift in our lives, it brings solace in hard times, it makes us happier, healthier. And of course, it’s been said by many more articulate people than me, we protect what we know and love. We want, we need, our leaders of tomorrow to have this relationship with the natural world.
Catherine: As I was writing up these questions I was listening to Spell Songs, created from poems by writer Robert Macfarlane, illustrated by artist Jackie Morris, in their books Lost Words and Lost Spells, in which they bring back to life nature words, and worlds, at risk of being lost. Spells play a crucial role in Between Sea and Sky. As a reader I felt both spellbound by your world and bewildered – that is, invited to be wilder, to enter a world growing wilder again. Do you think fiction can cast a spell and bring readers into closer relation with wild nature?
Nicola: Fiction does cast a spell. Reading Blaze Island, I certainly was under the spell of Miranda and Caleb as their lives adjusted to the newcomers on the island, and the incoming hurricane, and working out what all this means for them. And yes, I do think this is something good writing can achieve, taking us into wilder spaces, even as we read in our city bedrooms and urban classrooms.
Catherine: What’s your own relationship to the natural world – as you live and write? Do you live close to the sea?
Nicola: No, sadly. It’s a dream of mine, to someday live near the sea, but I live in north London, thankfully with many green spaces nearby which help restore me. I do seek out water. I swim in a nearby lido, I walk pretty much most days by a little urban waterway where I see cormorants and a heron, and ducks, swans etc. I seek wild places out like medicine. As I’ve got older, I’ve recognised this about myself: I’m happier when I’ve been somewhere green. Calmer. There’s even evidence that being outdoors in nature can make us kinder. I found this out, and many other things like this, from an amazing book by the writer Lucy Jones. It’s called Losing Eden: Why Our Minds Need the Wild. I now recommend it to everyone, so am here recommending it to you!
Tell me about where you live and where you write, Catherine!
Catherine: Oh, I love this book recommendation and I just read an astonishing, horrifying statistic in the Guardian review of it: “three-quarters of children in the UK, aged five to 12, now spend less time outside than prisoners”. I hope the spell of your books helps to counteract that. I’m lucky these days to write between city and country.
Some years ago my soul said, I need more nature, and I was lucky enough to be able to buy an old stone one-room schoolhouse, set amid fields, for what was very little money though a lot to me. So I write in both places but mostly out here. The green world is my place for nurturance. I totally agree with everything you say about the need to bring us back into connection with nature. To notice and care for the aliveness of the world around us. I’m lucky in Toronto to live surrounded by trees and a nearby forested park but there’s more space for wonder and awe out here in the country -- and complications, like the fields around me being sprayed by glyphosate. It’s rural but not far enough out to be wild, whatever that means these days. Still, I love it.
Nicola, can you imagine writing fiction for young readers that doesn’t somehow respond to the climate and ecological crises we face? In a recent piece for The Guardian writer Ben Okri spoke about the need for ‘existential creativity.’ I know you’re working on a new novel about the Arctic – can you say more?
Nicola: That was a tremendous piece by Ben Okri. It felt like a call to arms to creatives. Yes, I am working on a novel about the Arctic and I’m finding it a strange and tricky thing to do, because what I want to do most is to take the readers there in their imaginations, to write about the beauty and the wonder of this extraordinary landscape. Which so many people will never have seen in real life, and quite possibly won’t ever. And it’s desperately sad to know we’re losing these icy landscapes at such an unprecedented rate. But I want to write about hope, and imagine a different kind of future where we have stepped up to save our beautiful planet, where the balance has shifted in favour of the natural world. I’m still working out quite how to do this.
I was very moved by the icebergs that drift into the bay in Blaze Island. You had a line about how little time it takes for eternities to vanish. These parts must have been emotional to write?
Catherine: There was one summer when, perhaps because of wind or water currents, so many icebergs stranded in the bay off Fogo Island. The water was full of them. It was the most astonishing, beautiful and, yes, heart-rending sight. The little house where I lived, and which inspired Miranda’s house in the novel, sits on a cove on the ocean-side of the island and I could literally watch icebergs float past my back door - melting.
It’s so hard to wrap our heads around the scale of that ice, ten thousand years old or more, broken off the Greenland ice sheet that helps hold planetary life together – and you’re right it’s something that many people will never see; I’d never seen an iceberg until I went to Newfoundland. I wanted to bring icebergs to the page in a way that made them not scenery but presences, presences in time, disappearing presences; I wanted to give readers the chance to have an encounter, come into relationship with the ice on which we all depend, to imagine swallowing ice containing bubbles of ten-thousand-year-old air. As my character Frank does and I have done. If you take that into your body, you become a little bit iceberg, as old, as ephemeral, and, I hope, transformed, more open to attention and care.
When thinking about the future, we cannot bring into being what we can’t imagine, and so, even beyond offering hope, the imagination and stories play a crucial role in our path ahead. Nicola, what are your thoughts on this?
Nicola: It comes back to the natural world for me. David Attenborough said at COP26, addressing young people, “In my lifetime I've witnessed a terrible decline. In yours, you could and should witness a wonderful recovery." This is what I really want to write about, the wonderful recovery of the natural world, and what a marvellous story it is to write.
Find out more about Between Sea and Sky and Blaze Island.
Nicola Penfold was born in Billinge and grew up in Doncaster. She studied English at St John’s College, Cambridge. Nicola’s worked in a reference library and for a health charity, but being a writer was always the job she wanted most. She is married, with four children and two cats, and is an avid reader of children’s books.
Catherine Bush is the author of five novels, including Blaze Island (2020), a Globe & Mail Best Book, and The Rules of Engagement (2000), a New York Times Notable Book and a Globe & Mail and L.A. Times Best Book of the Year. Her books have been shortlisted for the Trillium and City of Toronto Book Awards in Canada. She was a 2019 Fiction Meets Science Fellow at the HWK in Germany and has written and spoken internationally about responding to the climate crisis through fiction. She is the Coordinator of the University of Guelph Creative Writing MFA, located in Toronto.