Kerri Arsenault is bringing MILL TOWN to town.

We are very excited to be welcoming Kerri Arsenault back to Columbia for this year’s festival. Her book, Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains, was the MU Honor’s College One Read pick for 2022 and such was the amazing reception that she received, we wanted to invite her back again to talk about this important and extraordinary (and much-lauded) book. It’s a work of brilliant narrative nonfiction, investigative memoir, and cultural criticism that illuminates the rise and collapse of the working-class, the hazards of loving and leaving home, and the ambiguous nature of toxics and disease with the central question: who or what are we willing to sacrifice for our own survival?

Credit: Erik Madigan Heck

Kerri Arsenault is a literary critic, co-founder of of The Environmental Storytelling Studio at Brown University (TESS), contributing editor at Orion magazine,  and author of Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains. Mill Town won the Rachel Carson Environment Book Award, the Maine Literary Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Leonard Prize for best first book in any genre. Mill Town was also a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and top pick for the Chicago Tribune, Literary Hub, Kirkus Reviews, Oprah magazine, People, Newsweek, and Publisher’s Weekly, among others. Her writing has been published in the Boston Globe, The Paris Review, the New York Review of Books, Freeman’s, the Washington Post, and the New York Times. 

Kerri is currently a fellow at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University and at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich, where she will be working on two biography projects that orbit around the lives of ordinary people and their intersection with waste, pollutants, and toxicities.