Where the Grass Still Sings: Stories of Insects and Interconnection

Through narrative, verse, and art, Where the Grass Still Sings celebrates the many tiny creatures that play crucial roles in our ecosystems―as well as the people on the front lines of the fight to save them.

Weaving art and science with inspiring stories of people doing their part to protect insects and the environment, author Heather Swan takes readers around the globe to highlight practical solutions to safeguard our fragile planet. Visit a sustainable coffee farm in Ecuador and a frog expert combating animal trafficking in Colombia. Explore a butterfly sanctuary in an Andean cloud forest and learn about a family of orchid farmers who are replanting a mountainside to attract native pollinators. Meet a bumblebee expert helping Wisconsin cranberry growers, a bark beetle specialist in a new-growth forest in Georgia, an entomologist collecting for the Essig Museum in California, and more. Against a backdrop of climate change, ecological injustice, and impending mass extinction, this book rekindles wonder and hope.

Featuring works by artists deeply invested in preserving the smallest beings among us, Where the Grass Still Sings is a paean to the natural world.

Heather Swan is a poet and a creative nonfiction writer. Her critically acclaimed book Where Honeybees Thrive: Stories from the Field, also published by Penn State University Press,won the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award and first prize in the Scholarly Book Category at the annual New York Book Show. She teaches writing and environmental literature at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.