Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy

America is at a crossroads. Conflicting political and social perspectives reflect a need to collectively define our moral imperatives, clarify cultural values, and inspire meaningful change. In that patriotic spirit, nearly two hundred writers, artists, scientists, and political and community leaders have come together since the 2016 presidential election to offer their impassioned letters to America, in a project envisioned by the online journal Terrain.org and collected, with 50 never-before-published letters, in Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy. In the inaugural piece in Terrain.org’s Letters to America series, Alison Hawthorne Deming writes, “Think of the great spirit of inventiveness the Earth calls forth after each major disturbance it suffers. Be artful, inventive, and just, my friends, but do not be silent.” Joining Deming are renowned artists and thinkers including Seth Abramson, Ellen Bass, Jericho Brown, Francisco Cantú, Kurt Caswell, Victoria Chang, Camille T. Dungy, Tarfia Faizullah, Blas Falconer, Attorney General Bob Ferguson, David Gessner, Katrina Goldsaito, Kimiko Hahn, Brenda Hillman, Jane Hirshfield, Linda Hogan, Pam Houston, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Karen An-hwei Lee, Christopher Merrill, Kathryn Miles, Kathleen Dean Moore, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Naomi Shihab Nye, Elena Passarello, Dean Rader, Scott Russell Sanders, Lauret Savoy, Gary Soto, Pete Souza, Kim Stafford, Sandra Steingraber, Arthur Sze, Scott Warren, Debbie Weingarten, Christian Wiman, Robert Wrigley, and others.

Dear America reflects the evolution of a moral panic that has emerged in the nation. More importantly, it is a timely congress of the personal and the political, a clarion call to find common ground and conflict resolution, all with a particular focus on the environment, social justice, and climate change. The diverse collection features personal essays, narrative journalism, poetry, and visual art from nearly 130 contributors―many pieces never before published―all literary reactions to the times we live in, with a focus on civic action and social change as we approach future elections. As Scott Minar writes, we must remain steadfast and look to the future: “Despair can bring us very low, or it can make us smarter and stronger than we have ever been before.”

Simmons Buntin is the author of the poetry collections Riverfall and Bloom; the co-author, with Ken Pirie, of Unsprawl: Remixing Spaces as Places; and the co-editor, with Elizabeth Dodd and Derek Sheffield, of Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy. He is the editor-in-chief of Terrain.org, the president and director of the board of Terrain Publishing, and the director of marketing and communications at the University of Arizona. He lives in Tucson.

Elizabeth Dodd is the nonfiction editor of Terrain.org and a distinguished professor of English at Kansas State University. She is the author of the nonfiction collections Horizon’s Lens: My Time on the Turning World, In the Mind’s Eye: Essays across the Animate World, and Prospect: Journeys and Landscapes and the poetry collections Archetypal Light and Like Memory, Caverns. She lives in the Flint Hills of east-central Kansas.

Derek Sheffield is the poetry editor of Terrain.org. His poems have appeared in the Southern Review, Orion, Poetry, Georgia Review, and several anthologies, including The Ecopoetry Anthology and Environmental and Nature Writing. Winner of the James Hearst Poetry Prize, he has received fellowships from Artist Trust and the Sustainable Arts Foundation. He is the author of the poetry collections A Revised Account of the West, winner of Hazel Lipa Environmental Chapbook Award, and Through the Second Skin, a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. He lives in central Washington.