Faculty and Guests

Carolyn Finney, currently an artist-in-residence in the Franklin Environmental Center at Middlebury College, is a storyteller, author, and cultural geographer. A Fulbright Scholar, a Canon National Parks Science Scholar, and recipient of a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in Environmental Studies, she has served on the U.S. National Parks Advisory Board, and has held positions at Wellesley College, the University of California, Berkeley , as well as the University of Kentucky. Along with being the new columnist at Earth Island Journal, she was recently awarded the Alexander and Ilse Melamid Medal from the American Geographical Society. She has published pieces in BESIDE, The Guardian, and the New York Times and has essays forthcoming in the anthologies Nature Swagger: Stories and Visions of Black Joy in the Outdoors (edited by Rue Mapp, November, 2022) and A Darker Wilderness: Black Nature Writing from Soil to Stars (edited by Erin Sharkey). Her first book, Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors was released in 2014.

Pam Houston is the author of both the memoir, Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country, which won the 2019 Colorado Book Award, the High Plains Book Award, and the Reading the West Advocacy Award, and more recently, Air Mail: Letters of Politics Pandemics and Place, co-authored with Amy Irvine. She is also the author of Cowboys Are My Weakness, Contents May Have Shifted, and four other books of fiction and nonfiction, all published by W.W. Norton. She lives at 9,000 feet above sea level on a 120-acre homestead near the headwaters of the Rio Grande and teaches creative writing at the University of California, Davis and at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She is cofounder and creative director of the literary nonprofit Writing by Writers and fiction editor at the environmental arts journal, Terrain.org. She raises Icelandic sheep and Irish wolfhounds and is a fierce advocate for the Earth.

J. Drew Lanham, a native of Edgefield, South Carolina, is the author of The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature, which received the Reed Award from the Southern Environmental Law Center and the Southern Book Prize, and was a finalist for the John Burroughs Medal. He is a birder, naturalist, and hunter-conservationist who has published essays and poetry in publications including Orion, Audubon, Flycatcher, and Wilderness, and in several anthologies, including The Colors of Nature, State of the Heart, Bartram’s Living Legacy, and Carolina Writers at Home. An Alumni Distinguished Professor of Wildlife Ecology and Master Teacher at Clemson University, he and his family live in the upstate of South Carolina, a soaring hawk’s downhill glide from the southern Appalachian escarpment that the Cherokee once called the Blue Wall. 

Nathaniel Rich is the author of Losing Earth, a finalist for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Award and the winner of awards from the Society of Environmental Journalists and the American Institute of Physics. His most recent book, Second Nature, longlisted for the PEN/E.O Wilson, features the story “Dark Waters,” which was adapted into a film starring Mark Ruffalo. Rich is also the author of the novels Odds Against Tomorrow and King Zeno, a writer-at-large for the New York Times Magazine, and a frequent contributor to The Atlantic and the New York Review of Books. He lives with his family in New Orleans.

Jennifer Chang is the author of The History of Anonymity and Some Say the Lark, which won the 2018 William Carlos Williams Award. Her poems have appeared in numerous publications, including American Poetry Review, The Baffler, the New Yorker, New York Times, Poetry, and A Public Space, and her essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, New England Review, New Literary History, The Volta, and elsewhere. She co-chairs the advisory board of Kundiman, an organization that supports Asian-American writers, serves on the editorial board of Poetry Daily, and teaches creative writing and literature at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.

Joseph O. Legaspi, a Fulbright and New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow, is the author of the poetry collections Threshold and Imago, and the chapbooks Postcards, Aviary, Bestiary, and Subways. His works have appeared in Poetry, New England Review, Orion, Sierra, World Literature Today, Best of the Net, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day. He co-founded Kundiman, a national nonprofit serving generations of writers and readers of Asian-American literature.

Ramona Ausubel’s new novel, The Last Animal, will be published by Riverhead Books in April, 2023. Her previous books, Awayland: Stories, Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty, A Guide to Being Born, and No One is Here Except All of Us have won awards such as the PEN/USA Fiction Award, the Cabell First Novelist Award, and have been finalists for both the California and Colorado Book Awards and the New York Public Library Young Lions Award. Her work has been published in the New Yorker, New York Times, Paris Review, One Story, Tin House, Oxford American, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She is a professor at Colorado State University.

Ladee Hubbard is the author of two novels: The Talented Ribkins—which received both the Ernest J. Gaines Award and the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award for Debut Fiction—and The Rib King. Her collection of short stories, The Last Suspicious Holdout, was published in March 2022. She is a recipient of a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship and has also received fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, the American Academy in Berlin, MacDowell and Hedgebrook, among other organizations. She earned a B.A. in English from Princeton University, an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and a Ph.D. in Folklore and Mythology from the University of California, Los Angeles. She currently lives in New Orleans.

Marc Lapin is Assistant Laboratory Professor of Environmental Studies at Middlebury College where his courses focus on the science of socioecological systems, land management, and conservation.  Marc is also the College Lands Ecologist, responsible for the conservation and stewardship of Middlebury’s six thousand acres of forest, wetland, and leased agricultural land. A consulting ecologist for nearly three decades, he has continued to work with state and federal agencies, conservation organizations, and private landowners. In both his college and consulting work, Marc utilizes expertise in ecosystem mapping, landscape ecology, conservation assessment and planning, and field botany to further land protection; he has been fortunate to have been involved in protection and conservation management of many thousands of acres.  Marc has worked extensively with Natural Heritage Programs and State and Federal Fish and Wildlife Departments in northern New England and New York, as well as with The Nature Conservancy, Vermont Land Trust, New England Wild Flower Society, Vermont Family Forests, and numerous local land trusts, town governments, and private landowners.  The ecological evaluation of Middlebury College’s lands conducted by Marc and ten college students laid the scientific foundation for the College’s Bread Loaf Conservation Project.