Both American nature writing and the environmental movement have historically been associated with whiteness and maleness. This seminar will consider the exciting explosion of writing from Black female-bodied voices and its intersection with feminist/womanist, queer, and indigenous/decolonial ecologies. We will engage with diverse readings that explore such themes as race, gender, motherhood, climate, healing, environmental justice, language, and metaphor vs. anthropomorphism. Our texts will include contemporary personal essays, poetry, lyric and enumeration/list essays, dialogs, hybrid creative nonfiction, and new nature writing, a genre-fluid form that encompasses memoir/travel/nature writing and foregrounds Climate Crisis. Together we will see what Black Feminist voices can teach us about global majority perspectives and narrative strategies for making environmental/ ecological/ nature writing accessible and relevant to all.Modern Topics courses are designed for Writing and Literature Majors and Minors and are focused on the critical investigation of a specific modern topic, movement, style, or tradition of literary and performative production, typically after the year 1900. Students will read and write critically on these topics, including multi-modal responses, and will position the texts within a socio-historical context.

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