Writing Climates

Join Windham-Campbell Prize recipients Joyelle McSweeney and Karen Solie for a vital conversation on poetry, ecology, and the atmospheres—both environmental and cultural—in which literature is created, moderated by poet and editor Meghan O’Rourke. McSweeney and Solie approach climate as both subject and condition. From McSweeney’s visionary poetics of decay and transformation to Solie’s precise, razor-sharp observations of industry, infrastructure, and landscape, both writers examine how environmental breakdown shapes our world, while also reflecting on the surrounding social and political climates that surround the act of writing itself. Together with O’Rourke, they will explore how contemporary poetry responds to ecological crisis, how external pressure alters form and syntax, and what it means to write within the turbulent conditions of the present.

Meghan O'Rourke is the author of The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness, a New York Times best seller and a finalist for the National Book Award, and the memoir The Long Goodbye, both of which have been widely translated. In her criticism, for which she won a Front Page Award, she writes about literature, art, and places where oversimplified cultural narratives take hold. Her most recent collection of poems, Sun in Days, was named one of the ten best poetry books of the year by the New York Times; her first, Halflife, was a finalist for Britain's Forward Prize for Best First Collection. A writer and an editor, she has held editorial posts at The New Yorker, Slate, and The Paris Review. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Radcliffe Fellowship, and a Whiting Nonfiction Award, she is a professor of creative writing at Yale and the executive editor of The Yale Review. Her new book, Partum, is forthcoming from Riverhead Books in 2028.