October 29, 2025
Christina Rivera
Christina Rivera: MY OCEANS
Book Talk & Reading
in conversation with Shannon Jackson
Wednesday, October 29, 2025
5:00pm
Arts Research Center, Hearst Field Annex D23
Free & open to the public
Reception to follow
*Pegasus Books will be on hand selling copies of My Oceans
*Note: Christina Rivera will be visiting with students from 1-2pm on Wed Oct 29, in Professor Greg Neimeyer's Art, Water, & California class, in Rm 285 Anthropology & Art Practice building. If you or your class are interested in attending, please write Laurie Macfee at macfee@berkeley.edu to reserve a space.
Co-presented by the Arts Research Center and the Environmental Arts & Humanities Initiative with support from the Dean's Office of the Division of Arts & Humanities and co-sponsored by the Departments of English, Comparative Literature, and Environmental Science, Policy, & Management, and the Center for Race & Gender
On October 29 at 5pm, Pushcart Prize winning essayist Christina Rivera will give a book talk and reading, followed by a conversation with Shannon Jackson, Cyrus and Michelle Hadidi Professor of the Arts & Humanities, director of the Environmental Arts & Humanities Initiative, and Department Chair of the History of Art. There will be a reception & book signing to follow.
Christina Rivera is a Pushcart Prize-winning essayist from Colorado whose girlhood was bordered by coastlines of Pacific Ocean. She is the debut author of MY OCEANS: Essays of Water, Whales, and Women (Northwestern University Press, March 2025) which was longlisted for the Graywolf Press Prize and a finalist for the Siskiyou Prize for New Environmental Literature. Her work has won the John Burroughs Nature Essay Award (the highest annual honor for a creative nonfiction essay on place, science, and the environment) and appeared in Orion, The Kenyon Review, Longreads, The Cut, and Terrain.org, among other places. Christina credits the fragmentation of her writing to her two young children and is also the grateful recipient of creative residencies at Millay Arts, Craigardan, and the Wellstone Center. Learn more about Christina and MY OCEANS at www.christinarivera.com
ARC Director Beth Piatote notes, "This collection is threaded with wonder, history, and heartache. In My Oceans, motherhood is not sentimentalized but shown as a transformative political power. Masterfully constructed and beautifully written, this book dwells in the depths—not only of oceans but of mourning, awe, anger, and action."
"I love that bobbing in the black sea of our universe is our astrophysical nature. That whale song, despite our inability to translate it, fosters such awe we’ve brought it into our homes, echoed it off the cold marble walls of the US Capitol, and set it adrift in the choppy sea of space. The universe’s oceans. Earth’s oceans. My oceans. When I feel myself disintegrating on top of a cliff surrounded by sea, it’s a homecoming I feel."
--Christina Rivera, from the essay "Quiseeds"
Topics
MY OCEANS
An urgent exploration of caring & mothering on a planet in crisis
In a swell of sea-linked essays, Christina Rivera explores the kinship between marine animals, humans, and Earth’s blue womb. Rivera’s investigative questions begin with the toxic burden of her body and spiral out—to a grieving orca, a hunted manta ray, a pregnant sea turtle, a spawning salmon, an “endling” porpoise, and the “mother culture” of sperm whales —as she redefines what it means to mother and defend a collective future. Braiding memoir with embodied climate science, Rivera challenges that it’s not anthropomorphism to feel deep connection to non-human species and proposes that gathering in collective grief is essential amid the sixth mass extinction on Earth. For ecofeminists, fans of Terry Tempest Williams and Rachel Carson—and for anyone who feels themself disintegrate in the presence of the sea—My Oceans offers a timely and wondrous descent into the deep waters of interbeing in which we swim.