Jeff VanderMeer: One Evening in Area X

Name: Jeff VanderMeer: One Evening in Area X
Start: 2025-04-22T19:00:00-05:00
End: 2025-04-22T20:30:00-05:00
Location: Center for Faith and Life, Recital Hall

April 22 @ 7:00 pm - 8:30 pm

Black and white phots of man in dark top, black rimmed glasses, standing behind a branch of blooming flowers.

Please join Jeff VanderMeer for One Evening in Area X when he visits Luther College on April 22nd. Area X is an unsettling concept from VanderMeer’s Southern Reach series–a zone that one enters through obscure borders and inside of which relationships to time, space, self, and ecosystem melt and morph. VanderMeer will discuss the social roles of fiction in uncertain times, the critical need for biology and ecological thinking in this moment, the ethics of rewilding yards, the ecstasies of birding, and more. The event format features VanderMeer in conversation with Andy Hageman, Professor of English and Director of The Center for Ethics and Public Engagement at Luther College, an audience Q&A, and a book sale & signing.

Jeff VanderMeer is the author of Hummingbird Salamander; the Borne novels (Borne, The Strange Bird, and Dead Astronauts); and the Southern Reach series (Annihilation, Authority, Acceptance, and most recently, Absolution), the first volume of which won the Nebula Award and Shirley Jackson Award and was adapted into a movie by Paramount. He has spoken at MIT, Columbia, Yale, and Vanderbilt, and gave the 2024 John Hersey Memorial Address at the Key West Literary Seminar. Environmental nonfiction by VanderMeer has appeared in Time, The Nation, Current Affairs, and Esquire, among others. VanderMeer founded the Sunshine State Biodiversity Group nonprofit in 2023.