Susan Cerulean
Critical Description of Work:
I've been studying what I believe is a core question of our times for many years: "Why is it so hard for us to protect the wild places and wild creatures that we love?" I've approached this complex problem in many ways, but most compellingly through my investigations of swallow-tailed kites (hence my new book, Tracking Desire: A Journey after Swallow-tailed Kites!)
My journeys after kites have led me to understand that the power of our longings is placing the integrity of life on our tender emerald planet so greatly at risk. We stand at the end of the Cenozoic Era, the great flowering age of plant and animal diversity. I wonder about the fault lines in our own culture. What are the fractured places in our hearts and minds and spirits that have allowed us to stand by and watch, and even to participate in, the destruction of so much life?
The good news is that many, many fine minds and hearts are attending to these critical questions, this critical time. And we must never underestimate the creative powers and support of Spirit, and our beautiful earth.
Contact Me:
Phone:
Email:
Website:
http://www.susancerulean.com/
Address:
Biography:
Susan Cerulean is the director of the Red Hills Writers Project, and very recently edited with Janisse Ray and Laura Newton, Between Two Rivers: Stories from the Red Hills to the Gulf. This locally-acclaimed anthology brought together personal essays written by 29 of the area's best writers and naturalists.
Cerulean has also edited The Book of the Everglades (Milkweed Editions) and The Wild Heart of Florida (University Press of Florida), and Guide to the Great Florida Birding Trail: East Section; with Ann Morrow, she wrote the Florida Wildlife Viewing Guide (Falcon Press). Her essays and poems have appeared in Orion, Earthlight, Hope, Defenders, Florida Wildlife and Snake Nation Review. She is anthologized in Elemental South; The Woods Stretched for Miles; The Wild Heart of Florida: Writers on Florida's Wildlands and Intimate Nature: The Bond Between Women and Animals.
As an activist, much of Cerulean's work brings attention to natural Florida, to local community-building and to slowing the rate of global warming. She is a founding board member of Heart of the Earth. She helped design Florida's Nongame Wildlife and Watchable Wildlife programs, and continues to work part-time as an interpretive writer for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.
Cerulean teaches nature writing at New College in Sarasota and many other venues. She and her husband, oceanographer Jeff Chanton, live in Tallahassee Florida with their 16-year-old sons, David and Patrick.
The author travels widely giving readings and lectures, speaking out on behalf of the diversity of life, especially the beleaguered Florida landscape and its wildlife, and on how we might reclaim a truly sustainable relationship with our only Earth.
Books & Essays
-
A. Tracking Desire: A Journey After Swallow-Tailed Kites
Published: University of Georgia Press 2006
Purchase Now
-
B. Between Two Rivers: Stories from the Red Hills to the Gulf
Published: (edited volume) Heart of the Earth 2004
Purchase Now
-
C. The Book of the Everglades
Published: Milkweed Editions 2002
-
D. The Woods Stretched for Miles: New Nature Writing from the South
Published: University of Georgia Press 1999
The Woods Stretched for Miles gathers essays about southern landscape and nature from nineteen writers with geographic or ancestral ties to the region. Susan Cerulean's chapter is entitled "Searching for Swallow-tails."
From the savannas of south Florida through the hardwood uplands of Mississippi to the coastal rivers of the Carolinas and the high mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee, the range in geography covered is equally broad. With insight and eloquence, these diverse talents take up similar themes: environmental restoration, the interplay between individual and community, the definition of wildness in an area transformed by human activity, and the meaning of our reactions to the natural world.
Readers will treasure the passionate and intelligent honorings of land and nature offered by this rich anthology. With the publication of The Woods Stretched for Miles, southern voices establish their abiding place in the ever-popular nature writing genre.
Purchase Now
-
E. Elemental South: An Anthology of Southern Nature Writing
Published: (edited volume) University of Georgia Press 2004
Susan Cerulean contributed the essays "Origin Moment" and "Writing the Birds."
Purchase Now