Gretchen Ernster Henderson writes across environmental genres and poetics of place. Her fifth book, Life in the Tar Seeps: A Spiraling Ecology from a Dying Sea, was released by Trinity University Press in 2023, and her writings have been published in many journals, including Ecotone, Orion, The Kenyon Review, and Ploughshares, also translated across five languages. Currently a senior lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin, she has taught creative writing across genres at Georgetown, University of Utah, and MIT. Recent awards include the 2023 Aldo & Estella Leopold writer in residence in New Mexico, 2022 fellow at the Women’s International Studies Center, 2020-2022 faculty fellow at UT-Austin's Humanities Institute, and 2019 writer in residence at the Jan Michalski Foundation for Writing & Literature in Switzerland. Born and raised near the Pacific Ocean, Gretchen lives seasonally in the Sonoran desert between two washes and welcomes the smell of creosote after monsoon rains.