Join Wisconsin author Tamara Dean for a celebration of the publication of her most recent essay collection, Shelter and Storm: At Home in the Driftless, which will be released by the University of Minnesota Press on April 22, 2025! There will be free refreshments. FREE to attend; Dean will have books for sale at the end of the reading.
Tamara Dean is the author of Shelter and Storm: At Home in the Driftless, forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press in 2025. Her work has appeared in The American Scholar, Creative Nonfiction, The Georgia Review, The Guardian, One Story, Orion, STORY Magazine, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. She's also the author of The Human-Powered Home. Her essay "Safer Than Childbirth" received a 2024 Pushcart Prize Special Mention and "Slow Blues" was named a 2021 National Magazine Award finalist. She holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and teaches writing through Hugo House, The Loft, Madison Writers' Studio, writers.com, and now, Lake Literary Center, More at www.tamaradean.media.
About Shelter and Storm:
Living mindfully with nature during a time of uncertainty
In the midst of the environmental crises of the early twenty-first century, Tamara Dean sought a way to live lightly on the planet. Her quest drew her to a landscape unlike any other: the Driftless area of Wisconsin, a region untouched by glaciers, marked by steep hills and deeply carved valleys, capped with forests and laced with cold, spring-fed streams. There, she confronted, in ways large and small, the challenges of meeting basic needs while facing the ravages of climate change—an experience at once soul-stirring and practical that she recounts in Shelter and Storm.
Dean’s boundless curiosity and gift for storytelling imbue these essays with urgency and a sense of adventure. She invites readers to share in her discoveries while hunting for water, learning that a persistent weed could be food, or burning a hayfield to recreate a prairie. Contending with the fallout of fires, floods, and tornadoes, she offers responses to natural disasters that reflect the importance of community, now and for generations to come. Whether tracking down a rare, blue-glowing firefly, engineering a beaver-friendly waterway to appease a dying neighbor, or building a house of earthen blocks, Dean unites personal experience with science and history, presenting a perspective as informative as it is compelling.
Keenly attentive to the stakes for our planet’s future—and the implications of extreme weather, shifting agricultural practices, and political divides—Shelter and Storm illuminates a thoughtful way forward for anyone concerned about climate change and its far-reaching consequences or for anyone searching, as Dean has, for a more sustainable way to live.
The Trophic State Reading Series features established authors who have published one or more traditionally published books. For 2025, the Trophic State Reading Series will present authors on June 4 (Tamara Dean) and September 25 (Christina Kubasta).