Fiction, Imagination and Hope | Libraries and Positive Climate Action

This event, originally titled 'Libraries and Positive Climate Action: Fiction, Imagination and Hope', took place on 10 October 2024. The information below is correct as of the publication date.

This webinar explores ways libraries can work with writers and other artists to advance climate action.

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.

This session reflects on the experience of the Climate Action Almanac, which works with writers around the world to encourage positive climate action, and the examples of libraries which have successfully developed initiatives that harness the potential of imagination to highlight climate issues and inspire climate action.

To understand more about the British Library's work on sustainability and climate change, visit our website: https://www.bl.uk/about/sustainability

The speakers for this event include:

Joey Eschrich is 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 books including The Climate Action Almanac (2024) and A Year Without a Winter (2019). From 2016 to 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 and a Climate Imagination Fellow with Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination. She writes speculative fiction, nonfiction and essays about science fiction and fantastic literature and collaborates with interdisciplinary, collective projects like the Cúmulo de Tesla collective and Mexicona: Imaginación y Futuro. Her work has been translated into English, Italian and Portuguese. She wrote the short story collection De qué silencio vienes and was the editor of Odo Ediciones, an independent, nonprofit and crowdfunded 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 and Visiting Postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Iberian and Latin American Cultures, Stanford University. Her research bridges environmental humanities and Latin American cultural studies. She edited the book Multispecies Futures: Kin-Making Practices for Planetary Emergency (Bartlebooth, 2023). Her forthcoming monograph 'Poetic Postnatures' deals with ecological thinking and politics of strangeness in contemporary Latin American poetry.

Fabio Fernandes is a Brazilian writer, lecturer and researcher. His books include the novel Back in the USSR, the novella Under Pressure and the collection Love: An Archaeology. He has translated science fiction novels into Brazilian Portuguese including William Gibson’s Neuromancer and coedited the anthologies We See a Different Frontier and Solarpunk - Come ho imparato ad amare il futuro. He teaches science fiction and politics at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo and is 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 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 several staff initiatives including the library’s inaugural Climate Writer in Residence programme, gaining regional and international award recognition for these initiatives in 2023. Sarah has worked in communications and marketing in public, non-profit and private sectors for over a decade.

Kendra Sakamoto is librarian at the West Vancouver Memorial Library. Starting her role 5 years ago, 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. Kendra’s work focuses on reconciliation and Indigenous programming where there is often an intersection with climate action work.

The session is chaired by Maja Maricevic, Director of Science and Innovation at the British Library.