Bio and CV

Holden Turner writes about making livable futures in the age of sea-level rise. With an eye to coastal sites in the Eastern US and Italy, he draws on narrative, ethnography, and ecological design thinking to collaborate in the creation of more joyful tomorrows. From 2022 to 2024 he learned from, researched, and taught about the Venetian lagoon while completing a masters degree in Environmental Humanities at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. He has worked with Wetlands books, the Maine Grain Alliance, and the Somali Bantu Community Association at Liberation Farms. His PhD research at Johns Hopkins University focuses on Anthropocene narratives from the Italian peninsula. He calls New England home and loves baking and biking.

He also runs a micro publishing project called Flooded Pine Press with co-conspirator Brianna Cunliffe.

Access my CV here: Holden Turner Curriculum Vitae


Dredged oyster bar, Venetian lagoon, 2024

Performing with the Bronse Coverte Theater Collective.
Pandora Climate Laboratory, Venice-Mestre, May 2024.

Terschelling, Netherlands, 2025.

Pavilion Raising at Liberation Farms. Photo by Kelsey Kobik.
Wales, Maine, 2022.

Some of my all-time favorite reads / works important to my thinking:

  • Calvino, Invisible Cities (1972).
  • Dante, The Divine Comedy (1314-21).
  • Eliot, Four Quartets (1943).
  • Gay, Inciting Joy (2021).
  • Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything (2021).
  • Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937).
  • Jemisin, Broken Earth Trilogy (2015-17) and Dreamblood Duology (2011-12).
  • Johnson, What If We Get It Right? (2024).
  • Joyce, Ulysses (1914).
  • LeGuin, The Hainish Stories (1970s-80s).
  • Mitchell, The Bone Clocks (2015) and Cloud Atlas (2004).
  • Morton, Hell (2024) and Dark Ecology (2016).
  • Nordstrom, Global Outlaws (2004).
  • Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind (2007).
  • Rush, The Quickening (2023) and Rising (2019).
  • Woolfe, To the Lighthouse (1927).


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Announcement: Flooded Pine Press!

I’m very excited. My friend Brianna Cunliffe and I are beginning to lay the groundwork for a soft open on a micro publishing house based in Durham, New Hampshire. We will be publishing essays and anthologies on transformative futures, starting from the local and regional levels. Taking inspiration from Elizabeth Rush’s Rising , we are calling our venture Flooded Pine Press . This idea was born the day after the 2024 election. I was reeling in my apartment in Venice, having cast my absentee ballot weeks before. That day I had plans to meet my dear friend Matilda, who was in town from Helsinki, and she invited me to walk the Ponte della Libertà (Freedom Bridge, an apt name for the day of mourning) that connects the mainland to Venice. The sunny distance, with cars and trains swooping past us for all three miles of our walk over open lagoon, was ritualistic for me. Helped to focus on what’s important, what was to come, in great company. We were later lounging in the sun on Campo San Lore...
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My friend and colleague remarks to me over dinner that islands make visible what it means, or might mean, to live with limitations. On an island it is not always expected that what you desire is at hand. Here on Terschelling, an island in the Waddenzee, Netherlands, it’s normal to make do with what you have. Island-ness, I say, is the embodiment of salvage culture. When you use a broken ship’s mast as the topline for your humble roof, you are solarpunking it with the sea. We go to speak with an islander who leads school groups to pick up trash on the northern beach. Under his knit cap and mustache he has a character deeply attuned to plastics and pollutants, and he is adamant that these represent the largest threats to humans and nonhumans alike. We are standing 150 km down along the coastal current from Rotterdam and just a few kilometers from a major shipping lane where cargo routinely gets tipped overboard. Terschelling, he says, is a place where ‘international rubbish’ washes up: ‘...
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