Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy ~ Virtual Book Tour @terrainorg #dearamerica

Author: Silvie April 22, 2020 1 Comment

You may know that I make it a habit of reading daily. Now that we’ve been under stay at home orders I get to read a bit more. Mainly because I’ve been going to bed later than usual. Recently I finished Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy. Keep reading to find out more about it.

Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy ~ Virtual Book Tour

Welcome to my stop on the Dear America virtual book tour. I really have enjoyed this book, let me tell you a little about it.

Since the 2016 presidential election, America has been barreling headfirst toward a crossroads. Conflicting political and social perspectives reflect a need to collectively define our moral imperatives, clarify cultural values, and inspire meaningful change. In that patriotic spirit, hundreds of writers, poets, artists, scientists, and political and community leaders have come together sharing their impassioned letters to America in a project envisioned and published by the online journal Terrain.org—the “Letters to America” series.

More than 130 works, all calls to action for common ground and conflict resolution with a focus on the environment and social justice, are collected in Dear America. Taken as a whole, the work is a diverse clarion call of literary reactions to the nation’s challenges as we approach future political elections (especially the one coming this November).

The book includes impassioned letters from experts, artists, and leaders such as Seth Abramson, Ellen Bass, Jericho Brown, Francisco Cantú, Kurt Caswell, Victoria Chang, Camille T. Dungy, Tarfia Faizullah, Blas Falconer, Attorney General Bob Ferguson, David Gessner, Katrina Goldsaito, Kimiko Hahn, Brenda Hillman, Jane Hirshfield, Linda Hogan, Pam Houston, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Karen An-hwei Lee, Christopher Merrill, Kathryn Miles, Kathleen Dean Moore, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Naomi Shihab Nye, Elena Passarello, Dean Rader, Scott Russell Sanders, Lauret Savoy, Gary Soto, Pete Souza, Kim Stafford, Sandra Steingraber, Arthur Sze, Scott Warren, Debbie Weingarten, Christian Wiman, Robert Wrigley, and others.

Here is one of the poems you’ll find in this book. I’ve been given permission by PR by the Book to share it with you.

Bridge – by Arthur Sze

More About The Book

Dear America reflects the evolution of a moral panic that has emerged in the nation. More importantly, it is a timely congress of the personal and the political, a clarion call to find common ground and conflict resolution, all with a particular focus on the environment, social justice, and climate change. The diverse collection features many pieces never before published—all literary reactions to the times we live in, with a focus on civic action and social change as we approach future elections. As Scott Minar writes, we must remain steadfast and look to the future: “Despair can bring us very low, or it can make us smarter and stronger than we have ever been before.”

About the Editors

Derek Sheffield is the poetry editor of Terrain.org. His poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Orion, Poetry, Georgia Review, and several anthologies, including The Ecopoetry Anthology and Environmental and Nature Writing. Winner of the James Hearst Poetry Prize, he has received fellowships from Artist Trust and the Sustainable Arts Foundation. He is the author of the poetry collections A Revised Account of the West, winner of Hazel Lipa Environmental Chapbook Award, and Through the Second Skin, a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. He lives in central Washington.

Elizabeth Dodd is the nonfiction editor of Terrain.org and a distinguished professor of English at Kansas State University. She is the author of the nonfiction collections Horizon’s Lens: My Time on the Turning World, In the Mind’s Eye: Essays across the Animate World, and Prospect: Journeys and Landscapes and the poetry collections Archetypal Light and Like Memory, Caverns. She lives in the Flint Hills of east-central Kansas.

Simmons Buntin is the editor-in-chief of Terrain.org. He has a master’s degree in urban and regional planning from the University of Colorado Denver and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Arizona. He is the recipient of the Academy of American Poets Prize, the Colorado Artist’s Fellowship for Poetry, and grants from the U.S. Forest Service, the Arizona Commission on the Arts, and the Tucson-Pima Arts Council. He is the author of Unsprawl: Remixing Spaces as Places, with Ken Pirie, and the poetry collections Riverfall and Bloom. He lives in Tucson, Arizona.

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