Whales, Candy, Insects & Jellyfish: Three Writers Speculating on Environmental Crisis

A reading of CNS faculty member Deborah McCutchen's creative non-fiction and speculative fiction works, "Whale Road" and "Jellyfish Dreaming", with the underlying purposes to create community and conversation around the themes of environmental crisis and conservation explored in their writing. Two other local authors, Kirsten Mosher, and Cindy Snow, will read highlights from their own speculative fiction works on the theme of environmental crisis, expanding the conversation beyond the walls of UMass until the greater community.

Cindy Snow's writing has appeared in the Massachusetts Review, Peace Review, Worcester Review, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Drew University, and she recently published a series of poems on the 17th century botanical artist Maria Sibylla Merian. Cindy lives in western Massachusetts and works at Greenfield Community College.

Kirsten Mosher is a visual artist and writer living in Massachusetts. Her flash-book Zero (minutes to) Home was published by Selektion (Frankfurt, 2021), and her chapbook Plea$e Steal Me for 100 Plus Dollar-zz has been recently published by Lily Poetry Review Books. She's published in Ellipsis Zine, the Bath Flash Fiction Anthology, The Cormorant Broadsheet and Sonder Magazine, and is forthcoming in Exacting Clam. Her series Automotive Stories occasionally show up in the Automotive sections of local newspapers. She's currently working toward an exhibit at Frac Pays de La Loire in Carquefou, Nantes, France, opening November 2024.