Join us for an Earth Day Celebration as WAMC’s Joe Donahue leads a discussion with author and editor Susan Barba and illustrator Leanne Shapton on their new book American Wildflowers: A Literary Field Guide. A book signing will follow the conversation.
American Wildflowers: A Literary Field Guide is a curated collection of poems, essays and letters from the 1700’s through today that features a diverse array of authors and focuses on wildflowers and their place in our culture and natural world.
Edited by Susan Barba, the “rich compendium of classic and contemporary writings inspired by wildflowers” (Publishers Weekly) also includes exquisite watercolors by Leanne Shapton which complement the texts. Published by Abrams in the fall of 2022, the volume has been praised by Booklist as “a significant addition to the tradition of writing about plants,” adding “this anthology urges us to notice the lessons offered by the tiniest bluet.”
Attendees will have the opportunity to purchase a specially-priced copy of American Wildflowers: A Literary Field Guide and can have it signed by Susan Barba and Leanne Shapton.
Susan Barba is the author of the poetry collections Fair Sun (2017) and geode (2020), a finalist for the New England Book Awards and the Massachusetts Book Award. Her poems have appeared in the New York Review of Books, Poetry, the New Republic, and elsewhere, and they have been translated into Swedish, German, Romanian, and Armenian. She works as an editor at New York Review of Books and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Leanne Shapton is an artist, writer, and publisher. Her illustrations appear on many book covers, including Women in Clothes, a collaborative project with Sheila Heti and Heidi Julavits, and her own Swimming Studies, which won the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography. She is the art editor at the New York Review of Books and lives in New York City.
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