Brown University creative writing professor Elizabeth Rush will explore ways small communities are addressing climate change during a March 5 campus visit.

Her talk, “On Rising Together: Creative and Collective Responses to the Climate Crisis,” will be held Thursday, March 5, at 7:30 p.m. at the First United Methodist Church, 1376 Olive St. in Eugene. 

With each record-breaking storm or flood, rising seas are transforming the coastline of the United States. Rush travelled from vanishing shorelines in New England to inundated bayous in Louisiana to chronicle the effect of sea level rise on vulnerable communities and ecosystems.

She employed a literary approach for her recent book, “Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore,” a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction.

“I believe that language can lessen the distance between humans and the world of which we are a part.” she said. “I believe that it can foster interspecies intimacy and, as a result, care.” 

In her talk, Rush will speak about a small community on the eastern shore of Staten Island, a place that hurricane Sandy both undid and remade from the ground up, investigating the storm’s aftermath and the radical decisions residents made about how to overcome their shared vulnerability. She will talk about those who have traditionally been left out of environmental discourse and how to make the conversation more whole moving forward. 

Rush teaches creative nonfiction at Brown. In 2019 she was named the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic artist and writer. She joined scientists from the United States and Great Britain aboard the research vessel Nathaniel B. Palmer for a 50-day scientific cruise to the Thwaites Glacier, one of the most remote regions in the world.

Rush’s talk is free and open to the public. The First United Methodist Church has free parking. For more information go to ohc.uoregon.edu or call 541-346-3934.