Gavin Van Horn, editor, and Heather Swan, poetry editor, selected essays and poetry for Sensoria: Attending to the Wonder and Vitality of Nature that call attention to the wondrous ways in which humans and other-than-human beings experience and perceive the world, not just through the senses but within them.

Humans, along with all other creatures, are an entanglement of sensual relations, shaping and shaped by our somatic engagement with the world. From the mating calls of chorus frogs to insect olfaction to elephant funerary rites to the memory-rich tastes of place, Sensoria offers an immersion in the sensual experiences of seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling—and their interactions, combinations, and more-than-human manifestations.

The contributors to Sensoria—including music composer David Rothenberg, historian of color Carolyn Purnell, bio-philosopher Andreas Weber, filmmaker Kalyanee Mam, neuroethologist Bill Hansson, travel writer and novelist Nick Hunt, and religious scholar Graham Harvey—explore and illuminate the biology and neurology of sensation as well as the imaginative possibilities for understanding the senses.

Co-hosted by the Yankee Bookshop, books will be available for purchase and signing.

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Gavin Van Horn, PhD, is the executive editor of Humans & Nature Press Books, the author of The Way of Coyote, and the co-editor of City Creatures: Animal Encounters in the Chicago Wilderness, Wildness: Relations of People and Place, the award-winning five-volume series Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations, and the five-volume series Elementals. He currently resides in San Luis Obispo, California, where you can find him wandering the nearby hills and shores, senses awakened by sage, hummingbirds, and ocean air.

Heather Swan, PhD, is a poet and nonfiction writer. She is the author of Where the Grass Still Sings: Stories of Insects and Interconnection and Where Honeybees Thrive: Stories from the Field (Penn State Press) winner of the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award. Her poetry collection A Kinship with Ash (Terrapin Books), was a finalist for the ASLE Book Award and long-listed for the Julie Suk Award. A second collection, Dandelion, was published in 2023. She teaches environmental literature and writing in Madison, Wisconsin.