We invite you to visit the Imagine the Future gallery before the lecture, and explore the Climate Chaser with Backyard Phenology. Doors open at 5 pm. Lecture begins at 7 pm.

Author and storyteller Mary Annaïse Heglar is known for her compelling dissection and interrogation of the climate crisis. Through the unique lens of her experience as a Black woman with deep roots in the American South, Heglar explores grief, power, and privilege–and the role of hope in the face of climate change. She calls on audiences to summon courage and take action.

This special lecture kicks off the Bell Museum’s “Year of Earth” programming and celebrates the re-opening of the Bell’s Imagine the Future gallery. Heglar will draw on her experience and writing (which includes essays, a novel, and a new children’s book) to help us imagine and actualize a just, equitable climate future.

About the speaker

Mary Annaïse Heglar is a writer who works at the intersections of climate change, climate grief, and climate justice.

Her essays have appeared in The Cut, The Boston Globe, Vox, Rolling Stone, Wired, and other outlets, as well as several essay collections like Not Too Late and All We Can Save. She is the author of the picture book The World is Ours to Cherish from Random House Kids (2024) and the editor of the recently announced Til Earth and Heaven Ring—an all-Black climate anthology with Pantheon Books. Her debut novel, Troubled Waters, an intimate portrait of two generations coming to terms with what it means to be family, Black women, and alive in a world on fire, released in May 2024.

She is the co-host and co-creator of the Hot Take podcast and newsletter with investigative journalist Amy Westervelt, which retired in 2022. In 2024, they launched Spill, a podcast further discussing the climate crisis. In 2020, she was Columbia University Earth Institute’s first Writer-in-Residence. She has taught as an adjunct professor at Columbia University in New York City and Tulane University in New Orleans. In 2020, she won a SEAL Environmental Journalism award.