For Immediate Release

Contact:
City Art Director Joel Long: joeltlong@yahoo.com

Nicole Walker and Julia Corbet to read at City Art

Salt Lake Public Library Main Branch
210 East 400 South
Salt Lake City UT 84111

Wednesday September October 3rd, 7:00—8:00 P.M.

City Art presents authors Nicole Walker and Julia Corbett at the City Library on Wednesday, October 3rd at 7:00 PM in the 4th Floor Conference Room.

In Sustainability: A Love Story, Nicole Walker questions what it means to live sustainably while still being able to have internet and eat bacon. After all, who wants to listen to a short, blond woman who is mostly a hypocrite anyway, who eats cows, drives a gasoline-powered car, who owns no solar panels, tsk tsking them? Armed with research and a bright irony, playfully addressing the devastation of the world around us, Walker delves deep into scarcity and abundance, but not just in nature, reflecting on matters that range from her uneasy relationship with bats to the fragility of human life, from adolescent lies to what recycling can reveal about our not so moderate drinking habits. With laugh out loud sad-funny moments, and a stark humor, Walker appeals to our innate sense of personal commitment to sustaining our world, and our commitment to sustaining our marriages, our families, our lives, ourselves.

This book is for the burnt-out environmentalist, the lazy environmentalist, the would-be environmentalist. It’s for those who believe the planet is dying. For those who believe they are dying. And for those who question what it means to live and love sustainably, and maybe even with hope.

Walker's previous books include Where the Tiny Things Are, Egg, Micrograms, Quench Your Thirst with Salt, and This Noisy Egg. Her work has been published in Orion, Boston Review, Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, The Normal School and other places. She curated, with Rebecca Campbell, 7 Artists, 7 Rings—an Artist’s Game of Telephone for the Huffington Post. A recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a notable essayist in Best American 2008, 2014, 2015, and 2016 and nonfiction winner of Best of the Net in 2013 and 2014, she’s nonfiction editor at Diagram and Associate Professor at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona. 

Julia Corbett is a Professor in the Department of Communication and Environmental Humanities Graduate Program at the University of Utah. With a background in journalism and environmental studies, she writes both academic research and creative nonfiction about human relationships with the natural world. Her academic research investigates science, environmental, and health communication from a cultural and macro-sociological view of social conflict and change. She authored one of the first texts in environmental communication, Communicating Nature: How We Create and Understand Environmental Messages (2006, Island Press). Her second book, Seven Summers: A Naturalist Homesteads in the Modern West, is a memoir about building a cabin and living in the woods in western Wyoming (Spring 2013, University of Utah Press). Her third book, Out of the Woods: Seeing Nature in the Everyday (Sep. 2018, University of Nevada Press) examines the products, practices, and phrases we take for granted in our everyday encounters with nature and encourages us to reimagine our relationship with it. 

This event was made possible with support from City Art, The City Library, and Utah Humanities.

Most featured readings are followed by an open reading.

The event is free and open to the public.  City Art is sponsored by the Utah Arts Council, the Salt Lake City Arts Council, Zoo, Arts, and Parks, X-mission, and audience donations.