The Hopper 2016

The Hopper is a lively environmental literary magazine, along with stunning visual art, from Green Writers Press that strives towards an invigorated understanding of nature's place in human life. The annual publication in a series is part of a new phase in nature writing that seeks to include a modern consciousness in narratives of place.

When used for cider making, a hopper is a wooden or metal box that collects fruits before they are funneled down through a chute to the crusher. In old Vermont towns, it was common for the community of growers to share one cider press instead of each farmer purchasing and maintaining his or her own. Come fall, people would cart their apples or pears to the farm that kept the mill, and into the hopper their fruits would go--often mixing with the products of a neighboring grower.

The Hopper believes that in order to refashion our lives to accommodate the knowledge we have of our environmental crisis, we have a lot of cultural heavy lifting to do. To reacquaint ourselves meaningfully with the natural world we have to turn our interpretive, inquisitive, and inspired faculties upon it. Through what we publish and the communities we encourage, The Hopper seeks to be a leader in this cultural re-centering and can be used for environmental education and discussion.

Dede Cummings is a writer, literary agent/publisher and commentator for Vermont Public Radio. At Middlebury College, she was the recipient of the Mary Dunning Thwing Award, attended the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference as an undergraduate waiter, and studied with Hayden Carruth at the Bennington Writers’ Workshop. In 2013, she was a poetry contributor at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Her poetry has been published in Mademoiselle, The Lake, InQuire, Vending Machine Press, Kentucky Review, Connotation Press, and Bloodroot Literary Magazine. She was a Discover/The Nation poetry semi-finalist and was awarded a writer’s grant and a partial fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center in 2016. Dede lives in Vermont where she designs books and runs the startup Green Writers Press. Her collection To Look Out From will be published by Homebound Publications in April 2017. Author photo by Howard Romero.

Sierra Dickey is a young writer and editor native to Cape Cod, Massachusetts, who maintains other family roots in the Northeast Kingdom. Sierra graduated with a degree in environmental humanities from Whitman College, where her honors thesis on ecofeminist ecopoetics received the Linda Meyer Award for best environmental essay. Sierra is passionate about both print and digital media as well as long walks and good coffee.

Rose Alexandre-Leach leads Sprouts for Kids (Green Writers Press), where she acquires and edits picture books, middle grade novels, and young adult fiction that reflect the publisher’s environmental mission. Rose is trained as a biologist; her work with words is informed and inspired by her time in the outdoors and as a teacher. Born and raised on the river in Vermont, Rose now lives in Brattleboro.

Jenna Gersie is a writer, editor, and educator currently based in rural northwest New Jersey. Jenna has participated in the Wildbranch Writing Workshop and the Bread Loaf Orion Environmental Writers’ Conference, and she recently completed a fiction writing residency at the Vermont Studio Center. Her writing has appeared in Orion, Zoomorphic, and Kudzu House Quarterly. Her website is jennagersie.com.

Anna Mullen is a poet and naturalist from the suburban foothills of the North Carolina Appalachians. She studied environmental literature at Middlebury College and as a poetry fellow at Bread Loaf Orion Environmental Writers’ Conference. Anna has special love for writings about the sea, speculative fiction, animal consciousness, psychologies of climate change, and queer ecology.