ASLE EcoCast Quick Fictions 2021

It’s our birthday! In this episode, we reflect on the first year of EcoCast, and then hear 25 environmentally-themed Quick Fictions. You can find bios of all the contributors below, in alphabetical order by first name.

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QUICK FICTION AUTHOR BIOS (alphabetical order by first name):

Abi Curtis is Professor of Creative Writing at York St John University where she runs the MA and MFA programmes. She is the author of two poetry collections, Unexpected Weatherand The Glass Delusion, and a speculative flood novel Water & Glass. She is currently completing a novel set on the Kent coast featuring an alien, and writing a co-authored New Critical Idiom book Speculative Fiction. She is on the editorial board for Gold SF, an imprint for feminist science fiction from Goldsmiths Press.

Andrew Hadfield is Professor of English at the University of Sussex. His most recent book is John Donne: In the Shadow of Religion (2021).

Ashwarya Samkaria, a Masters in English Literature (University of Delhi) and a Masters in Performance Studies (Ambedkar University Delhi) is currently working as an independent researcher whose publications in journals on Ecocriticism in Indian Fiction and on Body and Performance are forthcoming. She is also trained in the (neo)classical dance form Odissi and has performed extensively in India and abroad. Her areas of interest are performance studies, ecocriticism, postcolonialism, gender studies, and creative writing.

Barbara Krystal is a Marine Biologist and Author. She is writing a dissertation questioning the traits we use to define the human when we come into contact with marine invertebrates. 

Basak Almaz is a graduate of English Language and Literature and a grad student of American Culture and Literature at Hacettepe University, Turkey. She is a research assistant at Istanbul Aydin University and writing her MA thesis on the relation between climate change and neoliberalism through sci-fi novels of Kim Stanley Robinson.

Christopher Collier is an educator and ecological advocate, working at the intersection of art and cultural ecology. With a background in academia and community art, he currently teaches at Anglia Ruskin University, and City Lit college in London, England, as well as regularly facilitating workshops in a variety of contexts. He is a volunteer Ranger with the London National Park City organisation.

Erik Lauks is a writer living in Munich. Currently occupied by consciousness.

Huiying Ng works to expand the possibility of agroecological landscapes in Southeast Asia - she is a doctoral researcher at the Rachel Carson Centre for Environment and Society at the Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich, and an occasional-editor of Foodscape Pages, a journa-zine dedicated to food, community and inspiration in Southeast Asia. She has performed and created installations in group residencies with soft/WALL/studs (Yogyakarta) and Heroines’ Wave (Bangkok), and will have a speculative fiction piece in print in Antennae’s next issue, Uncontainable Natures. She also writes a Substack on food, commons and ag! Find her on Twitter / Instagram @fuiin.

Jada Ach is a lecturer for the Leadership and Integrative Studies Program at Arizona State University where she teaches classes in interdisciplinary and liberal studies. She is the author of Sand, Water, Salt: Managing the Elements in Literature of the American West, 1880-1925 (Texas Tech UP, in press) and coeditor of Reading Aridity in Western American Literature (Lexington Books, 2020). Her poetry has appeared in New South, The Dalhousie Review, and elsewhere.

James Burt is a writer and computer programmer. 

Kate Wright works at the interface of community-based social and environmental activism and environmental humanities research. She is currently completing her second book – an experimental environmental history of the Armidale Aboriginal Community Garden, co-authored with Anaiwan Elder Steve Widders, and is an Affiliated Researcher with the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Ludwig-Maximilians Universität in Munich.

Maggie Light is Assistant Professor at Otis College of Art & Design. She teaches storytelling as a means to process the effects of the climate crisis. Her work is published in CleaverMagazine, Furious Gazelle, and The Free State Review, and she’s represented by Bridget Smith at JABberwocky Literary Agency. Maggie is currently writing a YA cli-fi rom com. 

Marula Tsagkari is a PhD candidate at the University of Barcelona, Spain. Her research focuses on energy transition and degrowth.

Meenu Akbar Ali works as a Lecturer of English for HED Punjab, Pakistan. Her Masters was in English Literature from NUML, Islamabad. She was also a Research Scholar at The University of North Texas, Denton, USA. Her interests include Ecocriticism, Feminism and Postcolonialism.

Michael Hewson is an environmental geographer at Central Queensland University (Australia). Michael's research interests include the spatial analysis of the atmosphere. A motivation for Michael's creative writing is to influence public policy with strategic storytelling. 

Naomi Booth is a fiction writer and academic. She is the author of The Lost Art of Sinking, Sealed and Exit Management and her short fiction has been longlisted for the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award and anthologised in Best British Short Stories 2019. Her debut collection of short stories, Animals at Night, will be published in 2022. She lives in Yorkshire and is Assistant Professor in English Studies at Durham University.

Nicholas Royle is Professor of English at the University of Sussex. His books include Telepathy and Literature (1991), Jacques Derrida (2003), The Uncanny (2003), Quilt (2010), Veering: A Theory of Literature (2011), An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory (with Andrew Bennett, 5th edition, 2016), An English Guide to Birdwatching (2017),Hélène Cixous: Dreamer, Realist, Analyst, Writing (2020), and Mother: A Memoir (2020). Current projects include a collaboration with Timothy Morton on Covid-19, and a new ‘comic history of England’ focusing on David Bowie and Enid Blyton. 

Patrycja Austin is a mother and an Assistant Professor at the Institute of English Studies, University of Rzeszów where she teaches literature and researches the way mosses, fungi and lichens feature in contemporary fiction. 

Peter Boxall is Professor of English at the University of Sussex. He has written a number of books on the novel, and is currently writing a book on the precarious state of contemporary democracy entitled Fictions of the West.

Scott T. Starbuck’s book of climate poems Hawk on Wire was a July 2017 "Editor's Pick" at Newpages.com and selected from over 1,500 books as a 2018 Montaigne Medal Finalist at Eric Hoffer Awards for "the most thought-provoking books." His book My Bridge at the End of the World was a 2020 Finalist for the Blue Light Press Book Award. Starbuck taught ecopoetry workshops the past two years at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in UC San Diego Masters of Advanced Studies Program in Climate Science and Policy. His Trees, Fish, and Dreams Climateblog at riverseek.blogspot.com has readers in 110 countries.

Sonakshi Srivastava is an MPhil candidate at Indraprastha University, Delhi. Her works have appeared in Rhodora Magazine, OddMagazine, Feminism in India. She has been the recipient of the national story writing competition, “MyStory Contest” organized by TATA LitLive, the international literature festival of Mumbai thrice. Her short stories have also been anthologized, and at the moment she is one of the current recipients of South Asia Speaks mentorship programme.

Thea Verdak is a writer and minimalist. 

Yazeed Dezele is a writer of Africanfuturism, published in sub-Saharan, omenana and lawino.