Zoë Schlanger

Zoë Schlanger is a writer and environmental journalist whose work has appeared in Newsweek, Wired, The Nation, the New York Times, Quartz, the Fader, the Village Voice, and elsewhere. She covers how climate change and pollution impact human and non-human life. She is compelled towards stories that bear witness to the ways humans are not separate from our environments, despite what we might choose to believe—and which communities ultimately suffer most from the consequences of that disjointed thinking. Right now, she is developing a book-length work that explores the world of plant intelligence research and its implications for all of us. Zoë received the 2017 National Association of Science Writers' reporting award for a Newsweek cover story on environmental racism in the most polluted zip code in Detroit. In 2019, she was a finalist for the Livingston Award, the Morley Safer Award for Outstanding Reporting, the National Academies of Sciences Award, and the American Geophysical Union journalism award for “Shallow Waters,” a series about how climate change, water politics, and rising heat is transforming life at the Texas-Mexico border. Zoë has been a guest in journalism classrooms at NYU and CUNY's journalism programs. She graduated with a BA from NYU, where she focused on ecology, political theory, and writing.

http://zoeschlanger.com 

Zoë Schlanger holding a flower in the Loasaceae family, a group of flowers known to be able to store and retrieve "memories," Bonn Botanical Garden, Bonn, Germany, September 2019.

Samantha Shapiro

Samantha Shapiro writes long features and cover stories which have been internationally syndicated, reprinted in textbooks, translated into Chinese and Arabic, and nominated for the Livingston Award for journalists under 35. She has published stories in Mother Jones, the New York Times, Glamour, ESPN, Crain's, Slate, Lucky, Haaretz, The Seattle Weekly, The Jerusalem Report, and Wired among others.

Alani Santos, 11, praying at the Mount of Olives in São Gonçalo, Brazil.Credit...Sebastián Liste/Noor Images, for The New York Times

Catherine Taylor

Book cover: You, Me, and the Violence by Catherine Taylor

Catherine Taylor is a writer, editor, and educator who works in a wide range of non-fiction forms—from documentary and literary journalism to hybrid-genre texts. She is the author of You, Me, and the Violence (Mad Creek 2017), on puppets, drones, and power, and of Apart (Ugly Duckling Presse 2012), a mixed-genre memoir and political history that combines prose, poetry, cultural theory, and found texts from South African archives. Her first book, Giving Birth: A Journey Into the World of Mothers and Midwives (Penguin Putnam), won the Lamaze International Birth Advocate Award. Her essays, poetry, and reviews have appeared in The Believer, the Seneca Review, The Colorado Review, Witness, and elsewhere. Taylor was a co-founder and producer of The Human Rights Watch Film Festival and is a founding editor of Essay Press, an independent press dedicated to publishing innovative essays in book form. She is currently Co-Director of Image Text Ithaca MFA and Press, supporting work at the intersection of writing and photography. Taylor received her Ph.D. from Duke University and is an Associate Professor at Ithaca College