Red Hen Press in Pasadena is kicking off another season of its Hen House at Home Virtual Series on Wednesday, August 25, with a free Cli-Fi Special featuring Thea Prieto, winner of the 2019 Red Hen Press Novella Award for “From the Caves,” and Cai Emmons, author of bestselling “Weather Woman” and now its standalone sequel, “Sinking Islands.”
Cli-fi, short for “climate fiction,” is a genre of fiction that deals with the impacts of climate change and global warming. English teacher and former journalist Dan Bloom coined the term in 2007, and soon other authors caught on and began promoting cli-fi on social media.
On the Hen House at Home show on Wednesday, 4 to 4 p.m., Red Hen Press will discuss Prieto’s and Emmons’ work, their exploration of environmental fiction and catastrophe, and how they came to write their stories that encourage environmental consciousness.
Aside from winning the Red Hen Novella Award, Prieto is a recipient of the Laurels Award Fellowship, as well as a finalist for the international Edwin L. Stockton, Jr. Award and the Short Story Award for New Writers for “Glimmer Train.” Her work has appeared at Longreads, New Orleans Review, the Kenyon Review blog, and The Masters Review, among other journals. She writes and edits for Poets & Writers and The Gravity of the Thing. She teaches creative writing and publishing at Portland State University and Portland Community College.
Emmons is the author of the novels “His Mother’s Son,” The Stylist,” and “Weather Woman.” A sequel to “Weather Woman,” called “Sinking Islands,” is forthcoming in the fall of 2021. Her story collection “Vanishing,” winner of the 2018 Leapfrog Fiction Contest, came out in March 2020.
Emmons holds a bachelor’s degree from Yale University, and two MFAs, one in film from New York University, one in fiction from the University of Oregon. She has taught at various colleges and universities, including the University of Southern California and the University of Oregon where she taught fiction and screenwriting from 2002 to 2018.
To watch Hen House at Home, visit www.redhen.org/virtual, www.youtube.com/redhenpress, and www.facebook.com/
