To Everything on Earth : New Writing on Fate, Community, and Nature

In October 2004, Barry Lopez invited a group of writers to meet with him, Bill McKibben, Alan Weisman, and Dennis Covington at the Junction campus of Texas Tech University. Out of this meeting grew a community that has since collaborated on a number of initiatives and projects tied to fate, community, and nature, including this collection of essays. To Everything on Earth is a journey through many landscapes. It begins with stories that look at the external landscape, the world around us, asking hard questions about the capacity to destroy what we love best. The stories then turn inward, into the human heart, perhaps searching for an answer there. The journey ends by addressing perhaps the central question of our time: how best do we make a home on earth?

Kurt Caswell, assistant professor of creative writing and literature in the Honors College at Texas Tech University, is the author of An Inside Passage, which won the 2008 River Teeth literary nonfiction book prize. His essays and stories have appeared in numerous magazines and journals, including Isotope, Janus Head, Matter, Ninth Letter, Northern Lights, Orion, and Potomac Review. He lives in Lubbock, Texas.

Bill McKibben, author of many books on nature and the environment, is a scholar in environmental studies at Middlebury College and lives simply with his family in Vermont.

Susan Leigh Tomlinson is director of the Natural History and Humanities degree program in the Honors College at Texas Tech University. Her work has appeared in Writing on the Wind: An Anthology of West Texas Women Writers.

William E. Tydeman is deputy director for development and external relations in the Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library at Texas Tech University.

Diane Hueter Warner works in the Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library, where she is responsible for the James Sowell Family Collection in Literature, Community and the Natural World.