Deborah Fleming is the author of Resurrection of the Wild: Meditations on Ohio’s Natural Landscape, which won the PEN-America Diamonstein/Spielvogel Art of the Essay Award for 2020. She has also published five collections of poetry, a novel, and four volumes of scholarship. Previously a professor of English at Ashland University and winner of the Faculty Research Award, she served for many years as director and editor of the Ashland Poetry Press.

“Meticulously researched and lovingly written, Deborah Fleming’s Ghosts of an Old Forest is a meditative tribute to the native ecosystems of rural Ohio. Written in conversation with Thoreau’s Walden, Fleming describes—with a poet’s ear—the grave necessity for humans to caretake these magnificent resources. The end result is a book that, while a call to action, remains full of hope, wonder, and solace.”—Kelly Sundberg, author of Goodbye, Sweet Girl: A Story of Domestic Violence and Survival and the forthcoming The Answer Is in the Wound: Trauma, Rage, and Alchemy

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“Natural historian David Attenborough warns that healing our planet will require rewilding one third of the land and sea. By walking us past the ghosts of midwestern woods and farms, into the company of Aldo Leopold and Louis Bromfield, Deborah Fleming shows that step one is the rewilding of us.”—Karen Schubert, founding director of Lit Youngstown and author of The Compost Reader and I Left My Wings on a Chair