writer, artist, scholar

Gretchen Ernster Henderson writes across environmental arts, cultural histories, and integrated sciences by cross-pollinating creative and critical practices. The author of five books across genres, opera libretti and art media, her writings have been reviewed in The New Yorker, Guardian, TLS, and Literary Review, with interviews on NPR and BBC Radio. She is the incoming Spence L. Wilson Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Rhodes College and previously was Senior Lecturer and Faculty Fellow at the Humanities Institute at The University of Texas at Austin, Associate Director for Research at the Harry Ransom Center, Co-Director of an NEH Institute on Museums: Humanities in the Public Sphere at Georgetown University, Annie Clark Tanner Fellow in Environmental Humanities at the University of Utah, Distinguished Speaker in Art History at Rutgers University, Hodson Trust-JCB Fellow in Creative Arts at Brown University, and Visiting Artist in Music at MIT’s Center for Art, Science & Technology. Her work has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, Opera America, and artist residencies, including the Jan Michalski Foundation for Writing & Literature in Switzerland and Women's International Studies Center. Recent awards include the Lucas Artists Program Fellowship at Montalvo Arts Center, Artist in Residence at Fallingwater, and Aldo & Estella Leopold Writing Residency. Born and raised in San Francisco (CA), she teaches writing workshops across ecosystems, including the Oak Spring Garden Foundation, University of Arizona Poetry Center, and Randolph Lundine. Gretchen's book on Life in the Tar Seeps: A Spiraling Ecology from a Dying Sea (2023) is seeping into Dear Body of Water: a poetic water-harvesting project inviting people to write postcard-sized love letters to bodies of water to grow a chorus and cultivate care for watersheds across the globe.