Editor Taylor Brorby discusses "Fracture: Essays, Poems, and Stories on Fracking in America"

“If you are looking for information on fracking, you will find it here–but that is only the beginning. ... This is not just another literary anthology--it is an urgent act of witness.”--John T. Price, editor of The Tallgrass Prairie Reader

More and more people are being affected by fracking all the time, this new book gathers many of our nation’s best environmental minds together and bears witness to hydraulic fracturing here in the United States. Fracture: Essays, Poems, and Stories on Fracking in America explores the well-known, and little-known complexities of fracking through first-hand experience, investigative journalism, story-telling, and verse. At a time when politics and profits inhibit our ability to have meaningful discussions about the hazards of fracking, the perspectives in this collection are needed as never before to ignite the national conversation about how we can live with more compassion toward Earth.

“This stunning collection of essays, poems, and fiction is gripping and illuminating. The implications of fracking on our land, air, water, and human communities are powerfully evoked. Indeed, nowhere else has such a gifted group of writers been assembled for a clarion call to awakening for our future generations.”--Mary Evelyn Tucker, Co-director of the Forum on Religion and Ecology at Yale, Co-author of Journey of the Universe

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Taylor Brorby is an award-winning essayist, and poet. The Reviews Editor for Orion Magazine, his work has appeared in High Country News, Hawk & Handsaw, Earth Island Journal, and he is currently at work on both a poetry and essay collection. A noted speaker at colleges and universities around the country, he spends summers writing in western North Dakota and resides in Iowa, where he recently was involved in the Bakken Pipeline hearings.

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Taylor Brorby will be joined by three contributors to Fracture: Antonia Felix, Stephanie Schultz, and Amy Weldon.

Antonia Felix is the author of Sonia Sotomayor: The True American Dream as well as biographies of NATO Commander Wesley K. Clark, Andrea Bocelli, Harry Connick, Jr., and musical savant Tony Deblois. A native of Minneapolis, she worked as a copywriter for Bantam Doubleday Dell, HarperCollins and Scholastic during her thirteen-year stint in New York City, and after forays in Texas and Kansas, she and her husband returned to her hometown in 2011. Antonia Felix  is currently an instructor at Hamline University.

Stephanie Schultz is a graphic designer, writer, and marathon runner in St. Paul, MN. Her poems and essays have appeared in Wild Quarterly, Carnival Literary Magazine, Blotterature, Diverse Voices Quarterly, Paddlefish, and Prairie Gold: An Anthology of the American Heartland, and are forthcoming in South Dakota Magazine. She received her MFA in creative writing from Hamline University.

Amy Weldon is an Alabama farm girl with a Ph.D from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is Associate Professor of English at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa. Weldon is currently writing and revising a novel and a nonfiction book called The Hands-On Life: How to Wake Yourself Up and Save the World.