Kate Schapira is a poet, nonfiction writer, teacher, and climate-justice practitioner whose work connects language, place, care, weather, environmental crisis, and collective life. She is an Associate Teaching Professor in Brown University’s Nonfiction Writing Program and the author of six books of poetry as well as the nonfiction book Lessons from the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth. Her poems and public practice share a sustained interest in how private feeling develops inside social and ecological conditions.
Poetry and place
Schapira’s poetry repeatedly moves through streets, houses, markets, galleries, bicycles, food, weather, and the ordinary structures of urban life. Place appears as a network of sensory and social relations. A neighborhood is made from movement, language, commerce, architecture, climate, and the people who cross through it.
This attention gives the poems a documentary dimension while preserving lyric intensity. Details remain particular enough to establish a scene, and their arrangement opens questions about belonging, responsibility, memory, and perception.
Travel and language learning
Poems associated with travel move through neighborhoods, Shanghai television, supermarkets, food, houses, bicycles, art spaces, and street observation. Language learning becomes part of perception. The speaker watches, translates, misunderstands, revises, and keeps moving.
Learning another language changes the scale of ordinary encounters. Signs, overheard phrases, menus, broadcasts, and conversations demand fresh attention. Schapira lets this difficulty remain visible, making partial understanding part of the poem’s social reality.
Weather as social experience
Weather is unusually active in Schapira’s writing. Pressure, smell, rain, wind, heat, and typhoon conditions enter rooms and bodies. Atmosphere changes how people move, what they notice, and what kinds of vulnerability become visible.
This gives weather a social dimension. A storm is a physical event shared unevenly across a city. Housing, work, mobility, health, and access shape how the same conditions are experienced. The poems register climate through bodies and daily routines.
Climate and emotion
Schapira’s later public work extends this sensitivity to climate emotion. Fear, grief, anger, helplessness, responsibility, and hope become experiences that can be spoken aloud and examined in relation to action.
The emotional field matters because ecological crisis is encountered through knowledge and through feeling. People respond to environmental danger with different histories, resources, obligations, and thresholds of fear. Schapira’s work makes room for that complexity.
Climate Anxiety Counseling
Schapira began the Climate Anxiety Counseling booth as a public listening practice. The booth created a small social space in which people could speak about climate fear, grief, anger, uncertainty, and responsibility. Conversation became a practical form for encountering emotions that often feel too large or diffuse for ordinary settings.
The project’s scale is important. A booth, two people, and a conversation create a manageable structure inside a planetary problem. Listening becomes a way of making climate experience specific enough to be shared.
Lessons from the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth
Lessons from the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth, published in 2024, develops exercises that connect climate emotion with community, mutual aid, organizing, imagination, and purposeful action. The book extends a concern already visible in Schapira’s poetry: private feeling exists within relationships and public conditions.
The exercises give emotion a social direction. Fear can become a reason to seek allies. Grief can clarify attachment to places and lives. Anger can identify values and pressures. Imagination can help people picture forms of collective response.
Books and poetic practice
Schapira’s poetry books include TOWN, The Bounty: Four Addresses, The Soft Place, How We Saved the City, and Handbook for Hands That Alter As We Hold Them Out. These titles already suggest recurring concerns with place, address, touch, city life, change, and relation.
Across the books, poetic attention becomes a way of remaining responsive to surroundings. A street or weather system can be read for material evidence. A conversation can reveal social pressure. An ordinary object can carry traces of labor, care, or environmental history.
Care and collective life
Care gives Schapira’s writing an ethical center. Care is expressed through attention, listening, mutual aid, teaching, organizing, and the practical work of sustaining relationships. It has emotional and material dimensions.
This emphasis keeps collective life grounded in action. Communities are built through repeated acts that may feel small beside ecological crisis and still carry real consequence. Schapira’s work repeatedly returns to what people can notice, share, protect, and build together.
Attention as practice
Poetry and climate work meet most clearly in the practice of attention. Both ask a person to notice conditions closely, remain with complexity, and respond to what becomes visible. Language gives that attention shape.
Schapira’s writing develops from this sustained relation between perception and responsibility. Weather enters the body, place enters language, emotion enters public conversation, and care becomes a form of collective practice. Her work creates continuity between lyric observation and the difficult social work of living through environmental change.
Readers can continue through the site’s contemporary poets collection for other writers engaging climate, place, care, public life, and ecological attention.