Ingrid L. Taylor
2021 Right to Write Award Recipient
“As a writer and veterinarian, my work often centers on questions of our relationships with animals, both wild and domestic; how we assign animal species to artificial and fluid categories based upon their perceived usefulness; and how we can decenter our own human experience to better recognize animals as our cognitive and emotional kin.
I’d always considered myself a lover of animals and nature, but after becoming disabled several years ago, I found that I had to renegotiate my relationship with myself and the world around me. As my sense of self fell apart, I became sensitized to the many ways in which I’d participated in the hierarchical and oppressive structures that prevented me from truly connecting with the more-than-human world.
In the process of rebuilding my life and worldview, I moved from seeing myself as someone who loves animals and nature, to someone who envisions a world based on multispecies solidarity, rather than exploitative relationships. For me, this is an ongoing journey, and a theme I constantly return to in my writing.
Although my writing touches on many themes—intergenerational trauma, trauma to the land, posthumanism, folk magic and ancestry, and ecofeminism, at the heart is my concern for our relationships with the more-than-human world. These matter now more than ever, with the onslaught of the climate crisis, the inevitability of mass extinctions, and widening disparities in access to resources such as clean water and secure food sources.”