Please, someone— / tell me a poem can coax // oil from a sea bird’s throat.” So begins the final turn in Rachel Dillon’s poem “A dead whale can feed an entire ecosystem,” winner of the 2025 Treehouse Climate Action Poem Prize, an award given annually by the Academy of American Poets “to honor exceptional poems that help readers recognize the vulnerable state of our environment.” The Treehouse Climate Action Poem Prize was established in 2019 with support from Treehouse Investments, an infrastructure firm with a focus on renewable energy. “The science of climate change is unequivocal,” the Treehouse team told the Academy in an interview that year—but “we have failed to communicate.… We are failing to inspire.” This, they went on, is where poetry comes in: “We hope that poets will lend us their voices, to find allies and inspire change.”
This prize is one of a growing number of awards that champion environmental literature and the writers who make our earth’s stories feel vital, urgent, and new: Some contests, the Treehouse Climate Action Poem Prize included, recognize individual short pieces; others celebrate book-length works, or even support their creation by subsidizing works-in-progress. All share an inspiring belief in literature’s ability to connect readers to the earth’s stories and galvanize us to action.
Contests for shorter works include the Moth Nature Writing Prize, for prose or poetry; the Nature Chronicles Prize, for essay-length nonfiction; the NatureCulture Poetry Award, for place-based poetry and ecopoetry; and the Palette Poetry Nature Poetry Prize, for poems that engage with the natural world. Despite their short-form focus, these awards are large-scale in their ambition—and often in their impact. For example, the first-, second-, third-, and fourth-place winners of the Treehouse Climate Action Prize—which is guest-judged by a climate scientist and a poet, and annually receives more than seven hundred entries—are all published in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, reaching more than 300,000 readers. Dillon, who is the managing editor of Ploughshares, says that the visibility afforded her by this contest didn’t stop there; her winning poem was later “selected by Maggie Smith to be featured on The Slowdown, a podcast that has been a staple part of my morning commute for years; Maggie then wrote a generous analysis of the poem for her For Dear Life With Maggie Smith Substack. It was also reprinted in The Nature of Our Times anthology [Paloma Press, 2025] among some of my favorite ecopoets. It’s an honor to feel seen by so many poets I admire, and for this poem to live on in a variety of outlets.”
Another contest celebrating environmental literature is the Ellen Meloy Fund Desert Writers Award, a grant given annually to a writer whose literary or creative nonfiction book-in-progress brings “new perspectives and deeper meaning to the body of desert literature.” Deborah Jackson Taffa, the director of the MFA program in creative writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts, received the $5,000 award in 2018 for the project that would become her memoir, Whiskey Tender (Harper Perennial, 2024), which was a finalist for the 2024 National Book Award in Nonfiction. “The book took a while to write, and so the financial support was significant,” says Taffa, as was “the boost to my confidence”; the award also enabled her to travel from her then home in Saint Louis to the bluffs and canyons and sand washes of the Four Corners region, where much of Whiskey Tender takes place.
Taffa’s book is a nuanced portrait of the ways in which individual and family stories, Native history, U.S. policy, and the environment are interconnected—and the Desert Writers Award, given in honor of the late nature writer Ellen Meloy, helped identify it as an environmental work. “I was very surprised and happy,” Taffa says, “because the book certainly centers around the environment, but it’s not the type of book that you’d call a typical exploration of the wilderness or climate change or even outdoor adventures; it has so much more woven into it that has to do with an Indigenous life.”
This is another important role that contests celebrating environmental literature can play: supporting and championing stories about place and environment that expand the definition of the genre and go beyond more commonly tread themes. The Desert Writers Award recognition was particularly rewarding and important, Taffa says, because it acknowledged that “in the coming-of-age, there was an environmental story” and that “for an Indigenous family, the fate of the earth is closely tied to their own family circumstances.”
What about when these works-in-progress become published books in the world? One award that many of them will be eligible for is the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award, established in 2011 and counted among PEN America’s array of literary awards. Judged by a panel of experts in their fields of science as well as past honorees, the prize celebrates excellent literary writing that covers complex scientific topics for a general readership. Clarisse Rosaz Shariyf, the co–chief executive officer of PEN America, sees a pressing need for writing that can navigate this fraught terrain. “As the federal government bans, limits, or avoids phrases and words such as ‘climate change,’ ‘safe drinking water,’ and ‘carbon emissions,’ it becomes even more essential to spotlight writers who are responding to the current science and research, reporting it accurately, and making it accessible and understandable to the public,” says Rosaz Shariyf.
Another program recognizing books about the environment is the National Book Foundation’s Science + Literature selections. “The ethos of Science + Literature,” says Natalie Green, the National Book Foundation’s director of programs and partnerships, “is that the arts and sciences are stronger when they’re in conversation and that words and stories are such a powerful tool of connection, of hope, and of change.” Unlike the National Book Awards, Science + Literature doesn’t have a submissions process; every year the National Book Foundation solicits recommendations from an ever-growing list of experts, as well as additional suggestions via its website. Books are selected by a committee of writers, scientists, and literary professionals, who, Green says, “are able to evaluate both the real science and technology practices incorporated within a book and its impact, on a narrative and story level to connect with potential readers.”
Other awards that recognize published books or established writers include the Phillip D. Reed Environmental Writing Award, given by the Southern Environmental Law Center; the Henry David Thoreau Prize for Literary Excellence in Nature Writing, given by the Thoreau Society; and the Laurel Prize, a poetry award established by U.K. Poet Laureate Simon Armitage “to highlight the climate crisis and raise awareness of the challenges and potential solutions at this critical point in our planet’s life.”
Awards and programs like these, says Nicole Dewey, the publicity director of Spiegel & Grau, both legitimize the honored work and put it in the hands of interested readers who may in turn recommend it to a friend—which, she says, is “how books have a long tail and become evergreen titles that stay in print for decades.” Several Spiegel & Grau titles have won environmental awards, including Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature (2025) by Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian, which is one of the National Book Foundation’s Science + Literature Selected Titles for 2026. Another Spiegel & Grau title, Catherine Coleman Flowers’s Holy Ground: On Activism, Environmental Justice, and Finding Hope (2025), recently received the 2026 Phillip D. Reed Environmental Writing Award. Crucially, Dewey says, these awards also shine a light on those titles that combine both exceptional scholarship and exceptional writing, keeping readers engaged who might otherwise not read an environmental work.
In the current political climate, factual and complex writing about environmental issues is increasingly important—as is the stamp of legitimacy and support that contests and awards can offer. Says Rosaz Shariyf of PEN America: “Writers have been responding to the climate crisis long before the current rollback of environmental protections and measures aimed at responding to climate change, but writers are now at even greater risk. At a time when federal scientific systems are being dismantled, their work grows ever more important.” Rosaz Shariyf hopes that the PEN/E. O. Wilson Award, while primarily a celebration of excellent work, also “underlines how vital it is that writers feel they have the freedom to continue their work, to accurately and honestly report scientific findings, and to educate the public without fear of retaliation from any quarter.”
Celebration and fear often go hand in hand, it seems, in environmental literature. When Dillon began writing her Treehouse Climate Action Poem Prize–winning piece in 2024, she says: “I didn’t have much hope to offer; I only had my fears. And yet I’ve heard from many readers who feel that this is a poem of hope. It’s a gift to be read at all and especially moving to think that my poem could offer hope.”
Taffa, author of Whiskey Tender, sees a similar duality in the role of environmental writing. “I think sometimes, when we talk about the earth, we immediately focus on the negative impact of humans on the planet”—and while this is necessary, she says, “it’s equally important to celebrate the ways in which we have felt her lift us up.”
Emma Hine is the author of the poetry collection Stay Safe (Sarabande Books, 2021). Her poems and essays have appeared in Guernica, the Paris Review, and the Southern Review, among other publications.
Thumbnail credit: Lis Christy