Pell Center is hosting conversation with Elizabeth Rush, Pulitzer Prize-nominated author
Elizabeth Rush, author of the Pulitzer Prize-nominated book “The Rising,” will be in conversation with Jim Ludes, executive director for the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy, at Salve Regina on Tuesday, August 1, at 6:30 p.m. on the lawn of Ochre Court. This event is also in partnership with RI Center for the Book. To register for this event, go here.
A reception and book signing will follow this event. Attendees should bring their chairs and blankets for the lawn, as seating will not be provided. In the event of inclement weather, this discussion will be held inside Ochre Court.
Elizabeth 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. Rush was the 2021 recipient of the Bronze Telly Award for her episode of “Story in the Public Square,” which is produced by the Pell Center.
Central to Rush’s writing practice is the act of listening. She listens to those who live in front-line climate changed communities, to Antarctica’s great glaciers as they go to pieces, and to all those voices long locked out of environmental conversations. Her work explores a couple of fundamental questions — like what does the disassembling world ask of its inhabitants? How can people continue to live and love while also losing so much?
In 2019, Rush joined fifty-seven scientists and crew onboard a research icebreaker for months. The destination: Thwaites Glacier. The goal: 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.
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 W. Mellon Foundation.
To register for this event on Tuesday, August 1, go here.
