蜜桃传媒

A Room of One’s Own is thrilled to host聽Professor Sarah Ensor聽in celebration of the release of her first book,聽Queer Lasting: Ecologies of Care for a Dying World. She will be joined in conversation with聽Heather Swan.

This is an in-person event at A Room of One’s Own Bookstore.

About the Book

Queer Lasting聽asks what contemporary environmental thought鈥檚 seemingly necessary emphasis on the future has rendered unthinkable, and looks to queer literature for unexpected forms of persistence that emerge 鈥渁t the last鈥�: at the聽at the end of life, at the end of a family line, as the last living member of a species, perhaps at the end of the future itself.聽Defining queerness as a mode of collective life in which these paradigms of lasting鈥攅nding and persisting鈥攁re constitutively intertwined, the book reads two periods of queer extinction (the 1890s and the 1980s) for models of care, continuance, and collective聽action that are predicated on futurelessness.聽At a moment when our response to environmental and social cataclysm often involves either safeguarding the future (as we think we know it) or, alternatively, speculating and working toward alternate futures,聽Queer Lasting聽considers what becomes possible when we take our eyes off that nominal prize, setting our sights elsewhere and directing our energies otherwise.

Sarah Ensor聽works at the intersections of queer theory, the Environmental Humanities, and American Literature. She teaches in the English department at UW-Madison.聽Queer Lasting聽is her first book.

Heather Swan, MFA and PhD, is a poet and nonfiction writer. She is the author of the nonfiction books聽Where the Grass Still Sings: Stories of Insects and Interconnection听补苍诲听Where Honeybees Thrive: Stories from the Field聽(Penn State Press) the latter of which won the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award. Her nonfiction has appeared in such journals as聽The Sun, Emergence, Catapult,听补苍诲听Minding Nature. Her poems have appeared in such journals as聽Cold Mountain, The Hopper, One Art,聽 Poet Lore, Phoebe, The Raleigh Review, and聽Terrain. Her book of poems,聽A Kinship with Ash聽(Terrapin Books), published in 2020, was a finalist for the ASLE Book Award and long-listed for the Julie Suk Award. A second collection,聽Dandelion,聽was published in 2023. She is also a recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship, the Maud Weinschenk Award, the August Derleth Prize for Poetry, the John Tigges Poetry Award, A Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets Chapbook Award, and an honorable mention for the Lorine Niedecker Award. She teaches environmental literature and writing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.