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Gaston Hall
Doors open at 5:15PM
6:00-6:30PM | A Performance by the LubDub Theatre Co.
What has happened to the little brown bats? To the spotted tree frog? What will happen to homo sapiens? A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction asks how to be a human in an era of man-made extinction. Join us for an excerpt from this timely play written by Miranda Rose Hall.
7:00-8:00PM | A Keynote Discussion with Amitav Ghosh, Moderated by Razia Iqbal
Through books like The Nutmeg’s Curse and The Great Derangement, Ghosh challenges us to rethink how we understand our planet and our place in it. “Like a planet, a nutmeg too can never be seen in its entirety at one time,” he writes, a reminder that our perspectives are always shifting. Don’t miss this chance to hear from one of the most thought-provoking voices on climate today.
8:00PM | Reception and Book Signing in Healy Foyer
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Lohrfink Auditorium
Doors open at 4:15PM
5:00-6:00PM | Panel on Indigenous Peoples and Land featuring Linnea Axelsson and dg nanouk okpik, moderated by Mary Kathryn Nagle
“Climate Action” opens with a discussion on Indigenous relationships to land featuring Sámi-Swedish writer Linnea Axelsson (author of Aednan, which was long-listed for the 2024 National Book Award) and Inupiaq-Inuit poet dg nanouk okpik (author of Blood Snow, a finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry). The conversation will be moderated by Mary Kathryn Nagle, a lawyer and advocate for Indigenous rights.
6:00-7:00PM | Community Art Showcase & Reception
Explore climate storytelling through art at the Community Art Showcase, featuring poetry readings, a visual art exhibit, and a short documentary screening! Don’t miss this powerful night of resistance and creativity.
7:00-8:00PM | Keynote discussion with Kumi Naidoo, moderated by Brad Adams
Closing out the night, global activist Kumi Naidoo (former Executive Director of Greenpeace International and Secretary General of Amnesty International) joins Brad Adams of Climate Rights International to discuss the urgency of climate action and how we turn awareness into change.
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Lohrfink Auditorium
Doors open at 4:45PM
5:30PM | A Reading from Silent Spring by Susan Sarandon
To open the evening, join us for a reading by activist and Academy Award-winning actress Susan Sarandon, from Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.
6:00-7:00PM | A Conversation on Climate & Biology with evolutionary biologist Dr. Dino J. Martins and author Aminatta Forna
What does the future hold for sustainable human existence? Join us for a talk on climate change with evolutionary biologist Dr. Dino J. Martins and author Aminatta Forna. Martins earned his PhD in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology from Harvard University in 2011 and is now director of Stony Brook University’s Turkana Basin Institute. Forna is currently writing a book about the Great African Rift Valley, a place where landscape and climate intertwine with evolution that could hold the key to our collective future.
7:00-8:00PM | Keynote Panel featuring Omar El Akkad and Claire Vaye Watkins, moderated by Aida Alami
Join us for our closing event featuring journalist and author Omar El Akkad (What Strange Paradise, American War) and novelist Claire Vaye Watkins (I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness, Gold Fame Citrus). The conversation will explore literature’s role in facing the climate crisis as well as the realities we face ahead with climate dispersal and relocation.
8:00-8:30PM | Reception and Book Signing in Lobby
We speak with the featured writers, poets, and activists leading the conversation on how literature can bridge the gap between science and society, amplify frontline voices, and reshape our relationship with the planet.
Read onExplore a message from the Executive Director of Climate Rights International, plus contributions from creatives and activists and program information
Read onLubDub Theatre Co is an NYC-based company of artists animating stories of science, magic, and myth, with a particular focus on climate emergency and earthly repair.
Amitav Ghosh is the internationally-recognized author of numerous books, including The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis (2021), The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2017), which received the Utah Award for the Environmental Humanities in 2018, and Smoke and Ashes: Opium’s Hidden Histories released in February 2024. Ghosh holds two Lifetime Achievement awards and six honorary doctorates. In 2024, he was awarded the Erasmus Prize and was also elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Razia Iqbal is the John L. Weinberg/Goldman Sachs Visiting Professor at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs. Previously, she was the main anchor of Newshour, an international current affairs radio program on the BBC, listened to by millions in the U.S. on NPR.
Linnea Axelsson is a Sámi-Swedish writer born in the province of North Bothnia in Sweden. In 2009, she earned a Ph.D. in art history from Umeå University. Her book Aednan (Penguin, 2024) was long-listed for the 2024 National Book Award and received the August Prize in 2018. She lives in Stockholm, Sweden.
dg nanouk okpik is an Iñupiaq-Inuit poet from south-central Alaska. She is the author of Blood Snow (Wave Books, 2022), a finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, and Corpse Whale (University of Arizona Press, 2012), which won the American Book Award and the May Sarton Award. Okpik’s other honors include the Truman Capote Literary Trust Scholarship and the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize.
Mary Kathryn Nagle is an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation. She is an attorney whose work focuses on the restoration of tribal sovereignty and the inherent right of Indian Nations to protect their women and children from domestic violence and sexual assault. From 2015 to 2019, she served as the first Executive Director of the Yale Indigenous Performing Arts Program. Nagle has written many plays, including Manahatta, which was performed at the 2013 United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous People.
Kumi Naidoo is a prominent South African human rights and environmental justice activist. His dedication to democracy and justice led to notable international roles, including being the first person from the global South to lead Greenpeace International as Executive Director from 2009 to 2016. He later served as the Secretary General of Amnesty International from 2018 to 2020. Naidoo is currently the Payne Distinguished Lecturer at Stanford University.
Brad Adams is the founder and current Executive Director of Climate Rights International. Before founding Climate Rights International, he was the Executive Director of the Asia Division at Human Rights Watch. Adams has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, the Guardian, Foreign Affairs, and the Wall Street Journal.
Susan Sarandon is a mother, activist, and actress. Sarandon’s film credits include her fearless portrayal of Annie Savoy in Bull Durham, her Oscar®-nominated performances in Thelma & Louise, Lorenzo’s Oil, The Client, and Atlantic City, and her Academy Award®-winning and SAG® Award-winning role as Sister Helen, a nun consoling a death-row inmate in Dead Man Walking. Most recently she plays Victoria Kord in DC Film’s Blue Beetle, Lou in Bleeker St’s comedy, The Fabulous Four, and Linda Curson in The Lester Brothers, bowling comedy, The Gutter.
Dr. Dino J. Martins is a notable Kenyan entomologist and evolutionary biologist and current Director of Stony Brook University’s world-renowned Turkana Basin Institute (TBI). Martins earned his PhD in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology from Harvard University in 2011 before joining TBI as a postdoctoral fellow at Stony Brook University. Martins’ research in the Turkana Basin has included the description of new species of bees, including some of the most ancient lineages of bees known, and the discovery of genera previously not recorded from Africa.
Aminatta Forna is an author and the Director of the Lannan Center at Georgetown University. Her works include Happiness (2018), The Hired Man (2013), The Memory of Love (2011) Ancestor Stones (2006), a memoir, The Devil that Danced on the Water (2002), and an essay collection, The Window Seat: Notes from a Life in Motion (2021). She is the recipient of a Windham Campbell Award from Yale University, has won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best Book Award, and was a finalist for the Neustadt Prize for Literature.
Omar El Akkad is an author and journalist. He has reported from Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay, and many other locations around the world. His debut novel, American War, is an international bestseller and has been translated into thirteen languages. He is most recently the author of One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (Penguin, 2025) and What Strange Paradise (2022), which won the 2021 Giller Prize and the 2022 Oregon Book Award.
Claire Vaye Watkins is an author and creative writing professor at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness (2021), Gold Fame Citrus (2015), and the short story collection Battleborn (2012). Battleborn is the winner of The Story Prize, Dylan Thomas Prize, and the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, among others. She was also selected as a National Book Foundation “5 under 35” author after the publishing of Gold Fame Citrus.
Aida Alami is a Moroccan reporter who has been a New York Times contributor since 2011. Based in Rabat, Morocco, and Paris, she mainly covers migration, human rights, religion, politics and racism. She was a contributor to the best-selling book, “Our Women on the Ground: Essays by Arab Women Reporting from the Arab World,” and is a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism.
The Lannan Center at Georgetown University is a dynamic literary and cultural institution devoted to the public engagement of the contemporary written arts and to enriching the artistic and intellectual life of the Georgetown campus and community. This the Center does through a range of public events, interdisciplinary collaborations, and creative writing courses.
The Earth Commons—Georgetown University’s Institute for Environment & Sustainability—accelerates action on the most pressing issues of our earth through education, research, and action at Georgetown and beyond.
CRI is a new international climate and human rights monitoring and advocacy organization dedicated to preventing and addressing climate-change related human rights abuses; holding governments, corporations and financial institutions accountable for climate-related harms; and working to limit excessive greenhouse gas emissions and support climate mitigation and adaptation efforts.
Inspired by the Jesuits and the University’s mission to promote a liberal arts education, Georgetown Humanities Initiative is at the center of our university’s scholarly and public engagement.
The Center for Contemporary Arab Studies is the only academic center in the United States focusing exclusively on the Arab world, and it has been doing so with distinction since 1975.
