To help bookstores and libraries share books published by independent literary presses, we’ve put together this roundup of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction exploring topics of climate change, nature, and the environment.
Nonfiction
Holy Ground: On Activism, Environmental Justice, and Finding Hope by Catherine Coleman Flowers
Spiegel & Grau | January 28, 2025
Distributor: Two Rivers
ISBN: 978-1-95411-868-3
This collection of personal and political essays “equips us with clarity, lights a way forward, and rouses us to action–for ourselves and for each other, for our communities, and, ultimately, for our planet.”
Growing Papaya Trees: Nurturing Indigenous Roots During Climate Displacement by Jessica Hernandez
North Atlantic Books | November 11, 2025
Distributor: Penguin Random House
ISBN: 9798889840978
In this book, Hernandez “offers readers an Indigenous, Global-South lens on the climate crisis, delivering a compelling and urgent exploration of its causes—and its costs.”
Backyard Alchemy: on life with other creatures in a time of salvage by J. D. Ho
River River Books | February 24, 2026
Distributor: Itasca Books
ISBN: 979-8-9926116-2-5
This collection of environmental essays “transforms the loss of climate stability, relationships, health, and ecological integrity into sites of repair and restoration.”
Watershed by Joel Long
Green Writers Press | March 5, 2026
Distributor: Independent Publishers Group
ISBN: 9798992398861
The essays in this collection “focus on the Great Salt Lake and its beauty, its fragility, and its changing landscape in the face of climate change.”
World Without End: Essays on Apocalypse and After by Martha Park
Hub City Press | May 6, 2025
Distributor: Publishers Group West
ISBN: 9798885740487
This book of illustrated essays “circles the connections between climate change and faith in the fear and fascination of the end of the world.”
Open Reality: Meeting the Polycrisis Together With All Beings by Shodo Spring
Sea Crow Press | September 2, 2025
Distributor: Simon & Schuster
ISBN: 978-1-961864-30-6
This environmental book “opens practical possibilities for creating a shared, flexible culture that knows the natural world both as family and as a working partner.”
Daughter of Mother-of-Pearl by Mandy-Suzanne Wong
Graywolf Press | February 17, 2026
Distributor: Farrar, Straus and Giroux via Macmillan
ISBN: 978-1-64445-373-5
This book of essays collects “Wong’s reminiscences, dreams, investigations, and experiments in being with small invertebrates whose vulnerability and creativity inspire radical reimaginings of Earthlinghood.”
Fiction
Horsefly by Mireille Gagné
Translated from the French by Pablo Strauss
Coach House Books | May 20, 2025
Distributor: Consortium Book Sales & Distribution
ISBN: 9781552454992
This work of environmental speculative fiction is “a terrifying tale about the ways in which we try to dominate nature, and how nature will, inevitably, wreak retribution upon us.”
Autobiography of Cotton by Cristina Rivera Garza
Translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney
Graywolf Press | February 3, 2026
Distributor: Farrar, Straus and Giroux via Macmillan
ISBN: 978-1-64445-369-8
In this novel, Rivera Garza “chronicles the way cotton transformed the borderlands by reconstructing the cotton workers’ strike and reveals how cycles of deprivation and ecocide persist across generations.”
Poetry
Might Could by Anna Lena Phillips Bell
Waywiser Books | March 1, 2026
Distributor: Asterism Books
ISBN: 979-8-999063-80-9
In this poetry collection, Bell “considers how to make a life in hurricane country, amid a verdant landscape touched by industrial pollution and the climate crisis.”
Blue Flax & Yellow Mustard Flower by Alison Hawthorne Deming
Red Hen Press | March 4, 2025
Distributor: Publishers Group West
ISBN: 978-1-63628-230-5
In this poetry collection, Deming “extends her exploration of the meanings of nature into the tensions of our political and ecological moment.”
Parade of Storms by Evelyn Lau
Anvil Press | June 1, 2025
Distributor: Asterism Books
ISBN: 978-1-77214-245-7
“Weather, both physical and emotional, forms the backdrop” to Lau’s poetry collection, written when “the recent effects of climate change became more and more intrusive and unavoidable.”
In This Burning World: Poems of Love and Apocalypse by Mary Mackey
Marsh Hawk Press | May 15, 2025
Distributor: Independent Publishers Group
ISBN: 9798987617762
Mackey “unflinchingly imagines the future we will face as the Earth’s climate changes” in her poetry collection.
Eskatos & the Stretched Necks of Stillness by Mats Söderlund
Translated from the Swedish by Olivia Olsen
Restless Books | February 24, 2026
Distributor: Publishers Group West
ISBN: 978-1-63206-415-8
“In a sweeping but intimate blend of ecopoetry, mythology, and political verse,” this poetry collection “communes with Sweden’s primeval woodlands during an age of transformation.”
