Monday, October 7, 5:30 to 7 pm | PPL’s Seminar Room, 3rd Floor
Join us for an evening with science and conservation journalist Sabrina Imbler on their recent book, How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures, exploring radical models of family, community, identity, and care through the exploration of undersea life forms.
The ocean is exuberantly queer—just look at sex-changing clownfish and gay whales. But the natural world does not just parallel our own. It also offers radical models of the queer ways we can transform our communities, imagine ourselves, and care for each other. Sabrina Imbler’s book How Far the Light Reaches melds marine biology and memoir to find meaning and intertwine ourselves with the more-than-human world.
Exploring themes of adaptation, survival, sexuality, and care, and weaving the wonders of marine biology with stories of their own family, relationships, and coming of age, Imbler explores their queer identity through the underwater dance parties of the yeti crab, grapples with living as a mixed-race person through hybridized fish, and finds other unexpected connections in essays that are poetic and intimate. How Far the Light Reaches attunes readers to new ways of thinking about the “natural” world and the “social” world, questioning the distinctions in ways that paradoxically allow us to see each with more dimensionality and depth.
This event is free and open to the public; seating is limited and registration is encouraged!
This program is made possible in part through funding support from Rhode Island Humanities, an independent state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. RI Humanities seeds, supports, and strengthens public history, cultural heritage, civic education, and community engagement by and for all Rhode Islanders.
We are also grateful to the University of Rhode Island, especially Professor of English Marty Rojas, Director of Graduate Studies and Director, Rumowicz Literature of the Sea Lecture/Seminar Series, for her invaluable assistance and her department’s generous support of the series.