The British Library is hosting a series of webinars focused on libraries and the climate crisis. The aim of the series is to bring together international library leaders to share their different responses to the climate emergency.
Many libraries have discovered that working with writers and other artists is a powerful way to convey issues related to the climate crisis, but also to explore solutions and to seek more sustainable models of living and working. This session will reflect on the experience of The Climate Action Almanac, which works with writers around the world to encourage positive climate action. The initiative grew out of ASU’s Center for Science and Imagination, and has provided a model of integrating creativity and the power of storytelling with the reality of climate change across many different communities.
We will also reflect on the examples of libraries which have successfully developed initiatives that harness the potential of imagination to highlight climate issues and inspire climate action: Manchester Poetry Library’s exhibition Landscapes of Change and West Vancouver Memorial Library’s Climate Future programme, which includes a Climate Writer in Residence.
This event is free and open to the public. Learn more and register here!
Speakers
Joey Eschrich is the managing editor at the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University and assistant director for Future Tense, a partnership of ASU and New America on emerging technologies and society. He has coedited a number of books of fiction and nonfiction, including The Climate Action Almanac (2024), supported by the ClimateWorks Foundation; A Year Without a Winter (2019), named one of the best art books of the year by the New York Times; and Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities (2017), supported by a grant from NASA. From 2016 through 2022, he ran ASU’s Everything Change global climate fiction contests with colleagues at the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing. He hosts CSI Skill Tree, a series of conversations about how video games envision possible futures and build thought-provoking worlds.
Libia Brenda is a Mexican editor, writer and translator, two-time Hugo Award Nominee (she was the first Mexican woman to be nominated for a Hugo), and a Climate Imagination Fellow with Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination. She writes speculative fiction as well as nonfiction and essays about science fiction and fantastic literature. She frequently collaborates with various interdisciplinary and collective projects like the Cúmulo de Tesla collective, a multidisciplinary working group that promotes dialogue between the arts and sciences, and Mexicona: Imaginación y Futuro, among others. Her work has been translated from Spanish into English, Italian, and Portuguese. She is the author of the short story collection De qué silencio vienes and the editor of Odo Ediciones, an independent, nonprofit, and crowdfunded editorial project that publishes speculative fiction from Mexico with a pacifist-anarchist and feminist approach.
Azucena Castro is a Swedish Research Council Postdoctoral researcher at Stockholm Resilience Center, Stockholm University, and a Visiting Postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Iberian and Latin American Cultures, Stanford University (2022-2024). Previously, she was a Postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Geography, University of Buenos Aires. Her research bridges environmental humanities and Latin American cultural studies. She has edited the book Multispecies Futures: Kin-Making Practices for Planetary Emergency (Bartlebooth, 2023). Her forthcoming monograph is titled Poetic Postnatures and deals with ecological thinking and politics of strangeness in contemporary Latin American poetry (2025, De Gruyter).
Fabio Fernandes is a Brazilian writer, lecturer, and researcher currently based in São Paulo. He has published several books, including the novel Back in the USSR, the novella Under Pressure, and the collection Love: An Archaeology. He has translated several science fiction novels into Brazilian Portuguese, including William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange. He coedited the anthologies We See a Different Frontier, with Djibril al-Ayad, and Solarpunk – Come ho imparato ad amare il futuro, with Francesco Verso. He teaches science fiction and politics as part of the journalism program at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo, and is currently researching logistic utopias in the work of science fiction novelist Kim Stanley Robinson.
Helen Mort is a poet and novelist. Her collections Division Street, No Map Could Show Them and The Illustrated Woman are published by Chatto & Windus. She’s a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Professor of Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her pamphlet The Singing Glacier (2018) and her work on ‘Landscapes of Change’ (Manchester Poetry Library, 2024) respond to climate emergency in Greenland.
Sarah Barton-Bridges is the Head of Communications at the West Vancouver Memorial Library in British Columbia, Canada. In 2021, she chaired the Library’s Climate Future committee and supported a number of staff initiatives including the library’s inaugural Climate Writer in Residence programme. In 2023, she secured both regional and international award recognition for these initiatives. Sarah has spent more than a decade working in communications and marketing in the public, non-profit, and private sectors. She holds a B.A. in English (Literature) and Geography (Environment and Sustainability).
Kendra Sakamoto has been a librarian at the West Vancouver Memorial Library for the past 5 years where she spearheaded the IFLA award-winning Climate Writer in Residence programme. She developed and maintains the library’s Community Demonstration Garden, Swáy̓wi Temíxw and leads regular climate programming. In addition, Kendra’s work focuses on reconciliation and Indigenous programming where there is often an intersection with climate action work. Prior to her work in libraries, she spent years traveling the world with Cirque du Soleil and the Radio City Rockettes.
The session will be chaired by Maja Maricevic, Director of Science and Innovation at the British Library and responsible for the Library’s strategy, policy and partnership development across higher education and science. Maja is particularly interested in the big challenges of our time, such as the continuing digital transformation and climate change. Maja chairs the UK Green Libraries Campaign, a partnership of UK libraries working towards a better future for planet and people. Maja is an Advisory Board Member for the UK Research and Innovation programme Building a Greener Future. She is also a Board member of London’s Knowledge Quarter. She has previously worked in universities, government departments and as a professional consultant for PricewaterhouseCoopers.