Highwire ACT & Other Tales of Survival - Paperback

by Joeann Hart (Author)

2022 Hudson Prize Winner

A young couple raises crickets for food, a woman in a caged complex is witness to the deterioration of her neighbor, a homeless man contemplates an infant's grave from the Westward Expansion, and an uncompromising ego takes on a Biblical rain. These are among the stories from HIGHWIRE ACT & OTHER TALES OF SURVIVAL, where the climate crisis arrives not just as strange and violent weather, but as upheavals in our political and emotional climates as well. As characters struggle for survival with Covid, ecological destruction, grief, or mental illness, they attempt to find solace and restoration from a nature that is increasingly no longer in a position to give back. And with science unable to keep up, fake suicides, fairy tales, and delusion are the thorny tools humans are left with to carry on, yet carry on they do.

Author Biography

JoeAnn Hart is the author of the memoir Stamford '76: A True Story of Murder, Corruption, Race, and Feminism in the 1970s (University of Iowa Press, 2019). Her novels are Float (Ashland Creek Press, 2013) a dark comedy about plastics in the ocean, and Addled (Little, Brown, 2007) a social satire. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in a wide range of literary publications, including the Future Tense column of Slate.com, the anthology Among Animals 3, the anthology Fire & Water: Stories From the Anthropocene, Orion, The Hopper, Prairie Schooner, The Sonora Review, Terrain.org, the anthology Black Lives Have Always Mattered, and others. Her work often explores the relationship between humans and their environments. She lives in Gloucester, Massachusetts with her husband and a mixed bag of rescue livestock. HIGHWIRE ACT & OTHER TALES OF SURVIVAL is her first story collection.