Award-winning author and critic Emily Raboteau discusses her new book: a powerfully moving meditation on race, climate, environmental justice—and what it takes to Find Shelter. Lessons for Survival is a probing series of pilgrimages from the perspective of a mother struggling to raise her children to thrive without coming undone in an era of turbulent intersecting crises. Raboteau bears witness to the inner life of Black womanhood, motherhood, the brutalities and possibilities of cities, while celebrating the beauty and fragility of nature. This innovative work of reportage and autobiography stitches together multiple stories of protection, offering a profound sense of hope.

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Copies of Lessons for Survival are available for purchase and will be signed by the author at the event.
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About the Author:

Emily Raboteau writes at the intersection of social and environmental justice, race, climate change, and parenthood. Her previous books are Searching for Zion (2013), winner of an American Book Award and finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the cult classic novel, The Professor’s Daughter (2005). Since the release of the 2018 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, she has focused on writing about the climate crisis. A contributing editor at Orion Magazine and a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, Raboteau’s essays have recently appeared and been anthologized in the New Yorker, the New York Times, New York Magazine, The Nation, Best American Science Writing, Best American Travel Writing, and elsewhere. Her distinctions include an inaugural Climate Narratives Prize from Arizona State University, the Deadline Club Award in Feature Reporting from the Society of Professional Journalists’ New York chapter, and grants and fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Bronx Council on the Arts, the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, the Lannan Foundation and Yaddo. She serves regularly as nonfiction faculty at the Bread Loaf Environmental Writing Conference and is a full professor at the City College of New York (CUNY) in Harlem, once known as “the poor man’s Harvard.” She lives in the Bronx with her husband, the novelist Victor LaValle, and their two children.

About the Moderator:

Kerri Arsenault is a literary critic, co-director of The Environmental Storytelling Studio at Brown University; contributing editor at Orion magazine; and author of Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains. Her writing has been published in the Boston Globe, The Paris Review, the New York Review of Books, Freeman’s, the Washington Post, and the New York Times. Mill Town won the Rachel Carson Environment Book Award from the Society of Environmental Journalists, the Maine Literary Award for nonfiction, and an Inge Feltrinelli Prize, dedicated to women writers who have used their voices in defense of human rights. Mill Town was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Leonard Prize, the Eric Zencey Prize in Ecological Economics, the New England Society Book Awards, the New England Independent Booksellers Association nonfiction prize, the Connecticut Book Awards, and a semi-finalist for the Chautauqua Prize. Recently, she was the Democracy Fellow at Harvard’s Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History and a fellow at the Science History Institute in Philadelphia.

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Author programs at The Mark Twain House & Museum are sponsored by Connecticut Public Broadcasting and the Wish You Well Foundation.