Writer, Academic, Environmental Humanist.
Sharon Kunde is a writer, teacher, and mother grappling with the realities of earth breakdown. Currently an ACLS Emerging Voices Fellow at Duke University, she lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Sharon Kunde’s academic writing encompasses late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American nature writing and literary criticism, examining the ways in which racialized assumptions about the parameters of supposedly-nonhuman nature underpin equally exclusive ideas about what constitutes American literature and the reading methods appropriate to it. She works to imagine more capacious and inclusive reading practices.
Sharon Kunde’s poetry explores the limitations and possibilities of material embodiment in the context of motherhood and earth breakdown. Musical and intricate, its lines fuse allusion with earthiness, rage with humor. Dancing Girl Press recently published her chapbook, Year of the Sasquatch.
Kunde is currently at work on a novel entitled Silver City, narrated by a classical singer based in New York who travels back to her Rust Belt hometown when she’s suddenly afflicted with functional dysphonia. Caitlin Brink’s odyssey asks her to confront the legacies of colonial capitalism in her coming-of-age.
Having grounded their relationship in ambitious hikes in the Rockies, Appalachians, and Catskills, Kunde and her partner were determined to stay on the trail after their two sons were born. The blog recounts some ambitious and some less ambitious treks within the San Gabriel and the Sierra Nevada. Part travelogue, part ecotheory, and part how-to for parents bringing youngsters into the backcountry, Kunde’s blog delves into the nitty-gritty of love and hiking.
