Though newly elected, none of these individuals is new to ASLE. From 2010-2012, Cate Sandilands served on ASLE's Executive Council (while also serving, during part of that time, as president of the Association for Literature, Environment, and Culture in Canada (ALECC)), and served on the planning committee for the 2011 and 2013 ASLE conferences. Those members who attended the 2009 ASLE Conference in Victoria, B.C., will remember Sandilands' lively plenary session which addressed critical challenges for the future of ecocriticism, a field that she has contributed to immensely in the years since. A longtime member of the faculty of Environmental Studies at York University, where she serves as Canada Research Chair of Sustainability and Culture, Sandilands is committed during her tenure at ASLE's helm to "develop[ing] stronger cooperative ties with our sister organizations internationally" and sees ASLE as being "uniquely positioned to tie together our longstanding scholarly, environmental and political commitments...with newer works concerned with globalization, petrocultures, digitalization, agential plurality, and resiliences/resistences in the Anthropocence." Author of Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire; The Good-Natured Feminist: Ecofeminism and the Quest for Democracy; as well as numerous publications on queer, feminist, anti-racist, and multispecies justice, Sandilands says she has "developed a deep commitment to the importance of combining theoretical intelligence with political/ecological attentiveness and relevance." She brings this commitment, along with many exciting ideas for the shaping of the 2015 ASLE Conference, with her as she continues her service to ASLE in this new role.

Both the newly elected Executive Council members and Diversity Officer have likewise served ASLE in many capacities in the past. Most recently, Byron Caminero-Santangelo served as site host for the 2013 ASLE Conference in Lawrence, where he is Associate Professor and governance faculty member of Environmental Studies at the University of Kansas. He brings a "passion for building bridges across disciplines and between academics and community-based organizations" to his role on the EC. This passion is evident in his books Environment at the Margins: Literary and Environmental Studies in Africa and Different Shades of Green: African Literature, Environmental Justice, and Political Ecology, as well as with grassroots efforts to oppose road construction on a sacred wetland adjoining Haskell Indian Nations University (a project that received ASLE's inaugural Community Grant in 2013).  

Janet Fiskio, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies and Comparative American Studies at Oberlin College, first joined the ASLE community while a doctoral student at the University of Oregon, where she helped host the 2005 ASLE Conference in Eugene. At the 2013 Conference, Fiskio facilitated (with Michael Ziser) a pre-conference seminar on Climate Change, and also currently serves as ASLE's liaison to the Association for Environmental Philosophy. Fiskio's current book project, Counter Friction: Poetics and Politics in Climate Justice, "examines the contributions of literature, art, performance, and protest to constructing spaces for participatory democracy to emerge."  

Sarah Wald, newly elected Diversity Officer, also joined ASLE at the 2005 Conference in Eugene, while a graduate student, and has been an active member of the Diversity Caucus ever since. She sees ASLE's Diversity Caucus members as "uniquely situated not only to identify barriers to equity and inclusion, but also to envision new opportunities to support justice-oriented research, pedagogy, and community engagement." As both an academic and an activist, Wald has a deep commitment to "issues of inclusion and equity," and will strive as Diversity Officer to "promote an inclusive and accessible ASLE." Wald is currently Assistant Professor in the English Department at the University of Louisville.

In addition to these elected posts, ASLE also welcomes newly appointed Graduate Student Liaison Clare Echterling. A doctoral candidate at the University of Kansas, Echterling was instrumental in preparing for and pulling off the successful 2013 ASLE Conference in Lawrence, assisting then-President Paul Outka and site host Byron Caminero-Santangelo.  

Several other former members of ASLE's elected leadership likewise deserve our thanks and gratitude as their terms come to a close. Outgoing Diversity Officer Salma Monani and outgoing Executive Council Members Anthony Lioi and Kimberly Ruffin have contributed greatly to ASLE during their three-year terms. Lastly, Immediate Past President Joni Adamson (2012 President, 2011 Vice President) leaves large shoes to fill. As Paul Outka expressed in his announcement to members in December, "from her initiation of ASLE's new grant programs, to the development of our new logo, to her tireless and always astute engagement with a myriad of individual issues, Joni's leadership has made ASLE a more generous, better organized, and more inclusive organization." ASLE is, in short, a better organization, thanks to all of your hard work!

We are pleased to see such a geographical range of recipients of our International Membership Grants thus far. We have recipients from Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. We hope to encourage more individuals to consider applying for the grant. As a reminder, applicants are considered on a rolling basis; it is never too late to apply! Below, we highlight two recent recipients.

Ethiopian Takele Enkossa Gurmessa describes reading both the poetry of Wordsworth and Keats as well as the poetry in his mother tongue, Oromo, as influential in helping him to think critically and meaningfully about his early memories of the flora and fauna in the forested highland of western Ethiopia. Takele holds an MA in English literature from Addis Adaba University and he has recently written some ecocritical pieces for Ambo University's newsletter where he teaches and enjoys planning outings with students to the forests and mountains outside of Ambo. He looks forward to learning more from ASLE about how to cultivate an ecocritical tradition within Ethiopia. Welcome, Takele!

Adele Tiengo is a PhD student at the University of Milan who recently completed an MA thesis on animal studies and ethics. Having lived and studied for a time in Spain, she was able to establish alliances there with scholars associated with EASLCE. Eager to build relations with ecocriticism in North America because of her interest in North American literatures of the environment, she is pleased to be a membership grant recipient and to have been able to attend the recent ASLE conference in Kansas. She describes her current research as pertaining to "representations of apocalyptic and catastrophic scenarios as daily disasters in which human beings actively share responsibilities for their destructive potential." Welcome, Adele!

And welcome to all of our other recipients, listed below. We encourage interested applicants to visit our website or to contact our International Liaison, George Handley at [email protected].

The ASLE Subvention Committee is soliciting proposals for innovative projects in ecocriticism and the environmental humanities. We are especially interested in projects of a scholarly and/or creative nature that engage with new media, aim at fostering intercultural or interdisciplinary exchange, or seek to bring insights from the environmental humanities to a non-academic public. Subventions may be used to cover the costs of publication and dissemination, including such items as costs for color reproductions, translation, or server space.  

Materials (and any questions) should be submitted electronically to Amy McIntyre by June 15, 2014: [email protected].  Criteria for submission and required information include: 

1. Membership in ASLE or any international sister organization (ASLE-Japan, ASLE-UKI, etc.).
2. Author name and university association, if affiliated with an institution; include full contact information (email, mailing address, and phone numbers) and a curriculum vitae.  
3. A summary in English of the project. The total summary should not exceed 3 single-spaced pages.
4. An explanation of the benefits of this work, if it were funded, including comments on possible audience(s) and relationship to other work in the field. The explanation should also not exceed 3 pages.
5. An itemized budget.
6. A schedule for the proposed project that includes a likely date of completion or a specific time frame for the process.  

Materials (and any questions) should be submitted electronically to Heather Sullivan, by June 15, 2014: [email protected].  Criteria for submission and required information include: 

1. Membership in ASLE or any international sister organization (ASLE-Japan, ASLE-UKI, etc.).
2. Author name and university association, if affiliated with an institution; include full contact information (email, mailing address, and phone numbers) and a curriculum vitae. In the case of a translator applying to translate the scholarly work of someone else, provide full information, if possible, for both author and translator(s).
3. Information on original place and year of publication and note any relevant copyright issues related to the original press.
4. A summary in English of the project. This should include a brief overview of the book itself and a short summary of each chapter. The total summary should not exceed 3 single-spaced pages.
5. A rationale for why it would be beneficial if this work were translated into English, including comments on possible audience(s) and relationship to other works in the field. The rationale should also not exceed 3 pages.
6. A schedule for proposed translation work that includes a likely date of completion or a specific time frame for the process.
7. List of possible publishers or presses that might be interested in the translation. Applicant should briefly address feasibility of finding an English-language press.