Erika Howsare

Erika Howsare is the author of two books of poetry and several chapbooks. Her nonfiction has appeared in Longreads, Boston Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Terrain.org, the Brooklyn Rail, and other outlets. She is working on a book about the relationship between people and deer, to be published by Catapult Books in 2024.

Nonfiction – Issue 31

•The First Thing a Plant Does Is Branch in Two

An amateur botanist gets intimate with the plants of the Blue Ridge—ailanthus, stickweed, kudzu—and reconsiders Western science’s taxonomy of leafy criminals and citizens.