Laura

Trethewey

Laura Trethewey is an environmental journalist who writes about travel, technology, sustainability, and community. She published a collection of nonfiction essays, The ImperilledOcean: Human Stories from a Changing Sea in February 2020. Her writing has appeared in Smithsonian Magazine, Hakai Magazine, The Walrus, and other online and print publications. She was the senior writer and editor for the Vancouver Aquarium’s multimedia storytelling website Ocean.org and editor of the magazines Broken Pencil and Boulderpavement. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia. Trethewey grew up in Toronto, has lived across the country, and now resides in San Diego, California.

Writers & Books

Program History

2020 - Rising Star

Rising Stars

Selected by

Rosemary Sullivan

Citation

“Laura Trethewey’s passion is the ocean. It is the source of meaning, of memory, of the future. Describing herself as an ocean journalist, she has a scientist’s precision in describing its depths and dimensions, its weathers and living creatures. But she knows that to pull us into her vision she needs to locate the human in its vastness. She has a storyteller’s gift for tracking down the people of the ocean, from the underwater sea photographer to the refugees forced to traverse its perils. Her writing has an urgency because she knows our human survival is at stake. Trethewey sets an example of the kind of fervent and heartfelt writing about our environment that we need now if we are to save our world.” —2020 Writers' Trust Rising Stars selector Rosemary Sullivan