2012 Spring Residents
Session 1
Session 2
Session 3
Session 4
Terra Brockman is the 4th of 5 generations of an Illinois farm family, and author of The Seasons on Henry’s Farm (Agate/Surrey, 2009). After living in Tokyo, Manhattan, and other metropolises, she heeded the call of a particular patch of earth, and returned to Central Illinois where she writes on food, farming, and the environment for Orion, The Wildbranch Anthology, Zester Daily, and others. She is also the founder and Executive Director of The Land Connection, an educational nonprofit working to preserve farmland and train farmers to grow healthy foods for our tables. While at the Mesa Refuge she will dive into a book tentatively entitled For Good: Pleasing Yourself While Saving the Planet.
James K. Boyce is the author of The Political Economy of the Environment and Investing in Peace, co-author of Africa's Odious Debts, and co-editor of the books Reclaiming Nature: Environmental Justice and Ecological Restoration and Natural Assets: Democratizing Environmental Ownership. He won the Fair Sharing of the Common Heritage Award in 2011. He is currently working on a new book, provisionally titled Economics, the Environment, and Our Common Wealth. He teaches economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he directs the program on development, peace-building, and the environment at the Political Economy Research Institute.
Andrew Boyd is an author, humorist and veteran of creative campaigns for social change. He led the decade-long satirical media campaign “Billionaires for Bush." He co-founded Agit-Pop Communications, an award-winning “subvertising" agency, as well as the netroots social justice movement The Other 98%. He's the author of three books: Beautiful Trouble, Daily Afflictions and Life’s Little Deconstruction Book. Unable to come up with with his own lifelong ambition, he’s been cribbing from Milan Kundera: “to unite the utmost seriousness of question with the utmost lightness of form." You can find him at andrewboyd.com.
Boris Fishman was born in Minsk, Belarus. He has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and many other publications. In addition to time spent at the Mesa Refuge, he's received residencies from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Mass., and the La Napoule Art Foundation in France. (Though he got the most done at Mesa.) He holds a 2011-12 Fellowship in Nonfiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts. He's at work on a memoir about an alpha grandfather, a bashful father, and the American novelist whose books helped him make sense of their crossfire (and saved him from the irredeemable urbanity of his Soviet upbringing in the process).
Karen Garrison is a senior policy analyst in NRDC’s S.F. office, where she co-directs NRDC’s Ocean Program and works to protect marine life and ecosystems with a primary focus on the Pacific Coast. She has helped secure measures to promote Pacific rockfish recovery, improvements in California’s fishery management, limits on destructive bottom trawling in sensitive habitats, and funding to start the west coast groundfish observer program. She was instrumental in the passage of California’s Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA), a landmark law that has produced networks of safe havens for ocean fish and wildlife in three of four coastal regions of the state.
Betsy Hartmann is the director of the Population and Development Program and Professor of Development Studies at Hampshire College in Amherst, MA. She is the author of Reproductive Rights and Wrongs: The Global Politics of Population Control and two political thrillers about the Far Right; co-author of A Quiet Violence: View from a Bangladesh Village, and co-editor of the anthology, Making Threats: Biofears and Environmental Anxieties. At the Mesa Refuge she will be working on a book about apocalyptic thinking, particularly as it pertains to American environmentalism.
Sarah Hobson is the author of three books, including Through Iran in Disguise (Academy Chicago 1979), and was the joint editor of the book series, Religion, Science and the Environment (World Scientific, 1997-2002). She has presented and produced many documentary films for British television, working with stories and filmmakers from Asia, Africa and Latin America. She is currently the executive director of New Field Foundation which supports rural women’s food sovereignty in Africa. At the Mesa Refuge she will be working on an article about how rural women’s networks have the knowledge and experience to grow healthy food to feed the continent, but are being marginalized by high-tech agriculture, international land acquisitions and global energy interests. She will also be thinking through ideas for further writing.
Linda Sheehan is an attorney and the Executive Director of Earth Law Center (www.earthlawcenter.org), which works to advance new laws and governance models that reflect the inherent rights of the natural world to exist, thrive, and evolve. Most recently, she was a contributing author to Exploring Wild Law: the Philosophy of Earth Jurisprudence. Drawing on over 20 years of environmental advocacy experience, Ms. Sheehan comes to the Mesa Refuge to write about methods to evolve our legal, economic and governance systems to reflect our integrated and reciprocal relationship with the natural world, and as a result achieve more full and prosperous lives for all beings.
Ana Maria Spagna lives and writes in Stehekin, Washington, a remote community in the North Cascades accessible only by boat, foot, or float plane. Her books include Potluck: Community on the Edge of Wilderness, Test Ride on the Sunnyland Bus: A Daughter’s Civil Rights Journey, winner of the River Teeth literary nonfiction prize, and Now Go Home. While at the Mesa Refuge, she will be working on “Reclaim: A Journey" a project that explores stories that redefine reclamation. www.anamariaspagna.com
Fabien Tepper is a painter and journalist who writes about human-animal relations in both personal and political realms. Recently, she has focused on exploring insights from the academic field of human-animal studies, with a general readership. At the Mesa Refuge she will work on two articles: one is a review of efforts across academic disciplines, to explain how people come to accept high levels of human violence against animals. The other piece will examine non-veterinary career paths available to those wanting to study, help, or work among animals. She herself has worked with animals in a mobile vet clinic, a dog shelter, a wildlife hospital, multiple animal farms, and an animal protection/rescue group, as well as through journalism, portraiture, and companionship. She was a 2011 Fellow at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, and she is working to establish animal policy as a distinct field of journalism.
Mary Turnipseed thinks and writes about ways to alleviate pressures on ocean ecosystems. Currently she is a post-doctorate student at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis at UC Santa Barbara where she is studying the global seafood trade. She got her PhD at Duke, where she studied a particular philosophical and practical legal basis for the sustainable use of global oceans called the “public trust doctrine."
Kim Todd is the author of Sparrow (Reaktion Books 2012); Chrysalis, Maria Sibylla Merian and the Secrets of Metamorphosis (Harcourt 2007); and Tinkering with Eden, a Natural History of Exotic Species in America (W.W. Norton 2001). Her essays and articles have appeared in Orion, Sierra, and High Country News, among other places. She is an assistant professor at Penn State Erie and a senior fellow with the Environmental Leadership Program. At the Mesa Refuge she will be working on a collection of stories about unconventional environmental leaders and their reflections on what makes a successful campaign for change.
Nina Rothschild Utne is currently incubating Futurefit: 7 Principles for Navigating Change, scheduled for release by Chronicle Books in early 2013. In a prior life, she was the co-founder and former CEO of Utne Reader. Nina is a founding member of Lily Springs Farm, the Headwaters Fund, City of Lakes Waldorf School and Code Pink. Most recently, she became a member of the founding board of Van Jones’ initiative, Rebuild the Dream. She received a BA in English from Harvard University and an MA in Human Development from St. Mary’s. Her PhD was obtained as a mother to three sons plus one stepson.