New Nature Writers

Rarely can you say with a shard of truth that you remember the first time a writer’s work hit you in the head and the heart with a nearly audible slap, but I remember the first time I read a passage from Ana Maria Spagna.

When I encounter Claire Watkins’s place-based prose, I’m reminded of the first photograph I ever saw of a nuclear detonation crater. The image, shot at the Nevada Test Site, is disturbingly aesthetic.

“I was overcome with this very powerful feeling,” one Mojav refugee told CNN of the first time she saw the dune sea. “A feeling of, well, belonging.”