Elizabeth

Rush

Nonfiction Writer

Pulitzer Prize Finalist

Travels from: Providence, RI

“She is generous, good-humored, incredibly energetic and delightful to work with.” — Bates College

Elizabeth Rush is the author of The Quickening: Antarctica, Motherhood, and Cultivating Hope in a Warming World, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Central to Rush’s writing practice is the act of listening: listening to those who live in front-line climate changed communities, listening to Antarctica’s great glaciers as they go to pieces, listening to all those voices long locked out of environmental conversations. Her work explores a couple of fundamental questions: what does our disassembling world ask of us? How can we continue to live and love while also losing much?

Rush spent many years reporting from coastal communities already feeling the pressure of higher tides and stronger storms. In Rising, she weaves together her personal experience with first hand testimonials of those living on climate change’s front lines, guiding readers through some of the places where sea level rise is a reality. Hailed as “deeply felt” (New York Times), “a revelation” (Pacific Standard), and “the book on climate change and sea levels that was missing” (Chicago Tribune), Rising is both a highly original work of lyric reportage and a haunting meditation on how to let go of the places we love.

In 2019, Rush joined fifty-seven scientists and crew onboard a research icebreaker for months. The destination: Thwaites Glacier. The goal: to learn as much as possible about this mysterious place, never before visited by humans, and believed to be both rapidly deteriorating and capable of making a catastrophic impact on global sea-level rise this century. In The Quickening, Rush documents their voyage, offering the sublime—seeing an iceberg for the first time; the staggering waves of the Drake Passage, the torqued, unfamiliar contours of Thwaites—alongside the workaday moments of this groundbreaking expedition. A ping-pong tournament at sea. Long hours in the lab. All the effort that goes into caring for and protecting human life in a place that is inhospitable to it. Along the way, she takes readers on a personal journey around a more intimate question: What does it mean to bring a child into the world at this time of radical change?

Rush’s work has appeared in wide range of publications from the New York Times to Orion and Guernica. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Science Foundation, National Geographic, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Howard Foundation, the Andrew Mellon Foundation and the Metcalf Institute. Today she lives in Providence, Rhode Island with her husband and son. She teaches creative nonfiction at Brown University.

Elizabeth's Featured Titles

The Quickening: Antarctica, Motherhood, and Cultivating Hope in a Warming World

Milkweed Editions |

August 15, 2023

Environmental Science

An NPR Best Book of the Year
Winner of the CLMP Firecracker Award in Creative Nonfiction

“The Quickening is a book of hope.”—Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Under a White Sky

An astonishing, vital work about Antarctica, climate change, and community.

In 2019, fifty-seven scientists and crew set out onboard the Nathaniel B. Palmer. Their destination: the ominous Thwaites Glacier at Antarctica’s western edge. Their goal: to learn as much as possible about this mysterious place, never before visited by humans. And with them is author Elizabeth Rush, who seeks, among other things, the elusive voice of the ice.

Rush shares her story of a groundbreaking voyage punctuated by both the sublime—the tangible consequences of our melting icecaps; the staggering waves of the Drake Passage; the torqued, unfamiliar contours of Thwaites—and the everyday moments of living and working in community. A ping-pong tournament at sea. Long hours in the lab. All the effort that goes into caring for the human and more-than-human worlds. Along the way, Rush takes readers on a personal journey around a more intimate question: What does it mean to create and celebrate life in a time of radical planetary change?

What emerges is a new kind of Antarctica story, one preoccupied not with flag planting and heroism but with the collective and challenging work of imagining a better future. With understanding the language of a continent where humans have only been present for two centuries. With the contributions and concerns of women, who were largely excluded from voyages until the last few decades, and of crew members of color, whose labor has often gone unrecognized. Urgent, brave, and vulnerable, The Quickening is an absorbing account of hope from one of our most celebrated and treasured contemporary authors.

Environmental Concerns, Natural World, Nonfiction

Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore

Milkweed Editions |

June 12, 2018

Nonfiction

FINALIST FOR THE PULITZER PRIZE IN GENERAL NONFICTION
WINNER OF THE NATIONAL OUTDOOR BOOK AWARD
A CHICAGO TRIBUNE TOP TEN BOOK OF 2018
A GUARDIAN, NPR’s SCIENCE FRIDAY, PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, AND LIBRARY JOURNAL BEST BOOK OF 2018

Hailed as “deeply felt” (New York Times), “a revelation” (Pacific Standard), and “the book on climate change and sea levels that was missing” (Chicago Tribune), Rising is both a highly original work of lyric reportage and a haunting meditation on how to let go of the places we love.

With every passing day, and every record-breaking hurricane, it grows clearer that climate change is neither imagined nor distant–and that rising seas are transforming the coastline of the United States in irrevocable ways. In Rising, Elizabeth Rush guides readers through some of the places where this change has been most dramatic, from the Gulf Coast to Miami, and from New York City to the Bay Area. For many of the plants, animals, and humans in these places, the options are stark: retreat or perish in place.

Weaving firsthand testimonials from those facing this choice–a Staten Islander who lost her father during Sandy, the remaining holdouts of a Native American community on a drowning Isle de Jean Charles, a neighborhood in Pensacola settled by escaped slaves hundreds of years ago–with profiles of wildlife biologists, activists, and other members of these vulnerable communities, Rising privileges the voices of those too often kept at the margins.

Campus Reads, Environmental Concerns, Nonfiction

On Rising Together: Collective and creative responses to the climate crisis

What might we learn from the people living on climate change’s frontlines about the future that we share? In this talk, Elizabeth Rush will speak about a small community on the eastern shore of Staten Island–– a place that Sandy both undid and remade from the ground up––investigating the storm’s aftermath and the radical decision residents made to retreat from rising seas in an attempt to overcome their shared vulnerability. She will address whose voices have been traditionally left out of environmental discourse and how we might make this conversation more whole moving forward.

A Journey to Antarctica

This is an immersive multimedia presentation that recounts the author’s participation in a groundbreaking expedition to the calving edge of Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica. By combining rare video footage with scientific graphics and a rich narrative, Rush invites audience members to reflect on the possibility that in our climate changed world here and there are not as separate as they might seem. Can be adapted for use with young students.

On Creativity and Omission

Whose voices have historically been left out of a conversation and how can a creative project work to remedy what’s gone missing? This behind-the-scenes tour of the author’s research and writing process invites audience members to consider silence, negation, and omission as wellsprings for new work.

Towards An Other Antarctica

For most of the two hundred years since humans first saw Antarctica, the stories they’ve told have focused on conquest and extraction. But times are changing. More women make it to the last continent today than ever before, and as the climate crisis accelerates what happens in Antarctica increasingly reshapes the places we call home. In this multimedia presentation Rush recounts the past, present, and future of “the last continent,” exploring what it might look like to recognize Antarctica, itself, as an agent of change.

Op Ed 101: Whoever Tells the Story Writes History

This talk is designed to introduce audience members to the nuts and bolts of writing opinion articles for local, regional and national newsmedia. Participants will leave not just with understanding of what goes into writing an op ed but also having taken the first steps towards writing for a broad audience about a specific topic near and dear to their hearts.

Intimate Details

How does an author generate readerly attention and how can they maintain it? This interactive craft lecture (which involves a few real time writing prompts) explores the art of generating an immersive text while still giving readers space enough to think and feel for themselves.

The Art of the Interview

What goes on in a good interview and how can one prepare to conduct one? This craft lecture introduces the audience to the nuts and bolts of interviewing while also exploring the role that power and vulnerability plays in shaping this exchange.

Re-Vision

Ninety-five percent of a writer’s labor focuses on revision, but rarely do we think of it that way. In this interactive craft lecture, Rush demonstrates how radically a text ought to change from the early drafting phase, through line edits, towards a finished product. Audience members are expected to come prepared to participate by doing some real-time revision activities in small groups.

Beyond the Apocalypse: On imagining the future during ends times

Why is it easier to imagine a ruined world than a new world that rises out of ruins? This talk will explore how to foster and feed transformative action by exploring how communities coalesce, what holds them together, and what they might teach us about survival on our ravaged planet. Come for the cool photos of Antarctica, stay for the stories about agency and care.

Home or High Water: Elizabeth Rush on Coastal Life in the Age of Sea Level Rise

Liz Rush is a wonderful speaker for all audiences. The power of her work, her honesty, deep self-reflection, humor, and openness drew everyone in the audience into her stories. The event was a great success for listeners of all ages. — Middlebury College

As our keynote speaker, Elizabeth provided a perfect context for discussion about human mobility caused by climate change. She personalized the story, which is important for scientists and practitioners who are studying this or doing planning work. After the next panel discussion which included case studies (including a colleague of Elizabeth’s who talked about Staten Island also), we had a journalist and another author. This brought us full circle on humanizing the topic. — USC Sea Grant

Elizabeth Rush is pretty amazing—she engaged so well with students and audiences of all ages about climate change, sea level rise, creative writing, interviewing, becoming a professional writer, power and privilege dynamics, her journey to Antarctica, and so much more. She is warm, present, at ease, and honest with individuals and groups. We felt like we’d known her and she’d known us for quite a long time. — The Blake School, 2022

“Our event with Elizabeth, which included a class, a couple of meals and a public presentation, was informative and provocative. Elizabeth is an eloquent communicator that uses the detail and depth of her experiences to paint a vivid picture of the reality of storm surge and sea-level rise. Her concern about climate change and associated impacts, especially on front-line communities, is clear and compelling. She is very open, honest and genuinely interested in the personal impacts of climate events, which helps make discussions with her have more weight and influence. — U of Rhode Island, 2021

“Elizabeth Rush was a joy to have on our campus. She was engaging, personable, and connected well with our students. I am glad that she was able to come to our campus and meet with our students in the classroom as well as an campus wide presentation. Students appreciated the ability to connect the author with the narrative. — SUNY Maritime College

“Elizabeth was terrific. She’s a fantastic speaker, knowledgeable, articulate and poised, and her presentation stimulated a much greater degree of audience engagement than I usually see. It didn’t hurt that we had an excellent turnout for her lecture – unsurprisingly, since like many coastal communities, the threat of sea level rise looms large here. Elizabeth was adept at fielding unexpected questions from the audience, and she projects a kind of basic likeability and intelligence that had everyone eating out of her hand. Our CEO told me privately afterwards that she thought Elizabeth’s was the best presentation we’d offered all year and I would have to agree.” — Preservation Society of Newport County

“Elizabeth Rush visited Bates during three days in the fall of 2018 as an Otis Lecturer. This endowed lectureship has brought various luminaries to the College over the past two decades – people like Michael Pollan, Barry Lopez, Terry Tempest Williams, Mary Oliver. With Elizabeth’s visit we had a sense of turning towards an emerging generation of environmental writers and earth stewards, whose work speaks powerfully to college students painfully aware of how much of the earth’s diversity and beauty is in profound danger. Elizabeth connected deeply with our students, both in her public lecture and in more intimate meetings in classrooms and over meals. Elizabeth had taught at Bates for two years, and that certainly contributed to her ability to meet students where they are: but aside from that she is simply a deeply empathetic and gifted listener (this is part of what makes her writing so powerful). In classroom conversation students wanted to hear from her what it was like to talk with people of widely varying political positions and life backgrounds. They resonate with the way her prose moves from careful description of scientific process to evocation of place and difficult emotional terrain. They find her honesty and her level tone a refreshing alternative to more alarmist narratives – even if the news she’s delivering isn’t reassuring. She is generous, good-humored, incredibly energetic and delightful to work with.” — Bates College

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