Salve Regina hosts evening conversation with 'Rising' author Elizabeth Rush on Aug. 1
Newport, RI (07/17/2023) — Pulitzer Prize nominated author Elizabeth Rush will participate in a public conversation on the lawn of Ochre Court on Salve Regina University's campus on Tuesday, August 1 beginning at 6:30 p.m.
Free and open to the public, those interested in attending are asked to RSVP and should bring a beach chair and/or blanket for sitting. In the event of inclement weather, the discussion will be held inside Ochre Court. Presented in partnership with RI Center for the Book, a reception and book signing will follow the discussion.
Rush will be interviewed by Jim Ludes, executive director of Salve's Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy at Salve and host of the six-time Telly Award-winning series, "Story in the Public Square." Rush was a 2021 recipient of the Bronze Telly Award for her episode on the storytelling and public affairs series that airs on PBS.
Rush is the author of "The Quickening: Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth" and "Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore," a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Central to Rush's writing practice is the act of listening: listening to those who live in front-line climate changed communities, listening to Antarctica's great glaciers as they go to pieces, listening to all those voices long locked out of environmental conversations. Her work explores a couple of fundamental questions: what does our disassembling world ask of us? How can we continue to live and love while also losing much?
In 2019, Rush joined 57 scientists and crew onboard a research icebreaker bound for Thwaites Glacier to learn as much as possible about this mysterious place, never before visited by humans, and believed to be both rapidly deteriorating and capable of making a catastrophic impact on global sea-level rise this century. In "The Quickening," Rush documents their voyage, offering the sublime-seeing an iceberg for the first time; the staggering waves of the Drake Passage, the torqued, unfamiliar contours of Thwaites-alongside the workaday moments of this groundbreaking expedition. A ping-pong tournament at sea. Long hours in the lab. All the effort that goes into caring for and protecting human life in a place that is inhospitable to it. Along the way, she takes readers on a personal journey around a more intimate question: What does it mean to bring a child into the world at this time of radical change?
Rush's work has appeared in a wide range of publications from the New York Times to Orion and Guernica. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Science Foundation, National Geographic, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Howard Foundation, the Andrew Mellon Foundation and the Metcalf Institute. She lives with her husband and son in Providence, where she teaches creative nonfiction at Brown University.
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Photo Credit: Stephanie Ewens Photography