Dear Tomorrow: Climate Writing Workshop led by Emily Raboteau and Tao Leigh Goffe

Emily Raboteau writes at the intersection of social and environmental justice, race, climate change, public art, and parenthood. Her latest book is Lessons for Survival, shortlisted for the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize. Since the release of the 2018 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, she has focused on writing longform essays about the climate crisis. A contributing editor at Orion Magazine and a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, she serves as nonfiction faculty at the Bread Loaf Environmental Writing Conference and is a full professor in the Black Studies Department at the City College of New York (CUNY). 

Tao Leigh Goffe is an award-winning writer, theorist, and interdisciplinary artist who grew up between the UK and New York City. For the past fifteen years she has worked as an academic and has been invited to give keynote lectures in her specialities of colonial histories of race, geology, climate, and media technologies. Dr. Goffe lives and works in Manhattan where she is an Associate Professor at Hunter College, CUNY. She teaches classes on literary theory and cultural history.

Dr. Goffe’s book on how the climate crisis is a racial crisis is called DARK LABORATORY: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis: (Doubleday and Hamish Hamilton, Penguin UK, 2025).

Award-winning author and critic Emily Raboteau crafts a powerfully moving meditation on race, climate, environmental justice—and what it takes to find shelter.

Lessons for Survival is a probing series of pilgrimages from the perspective of a mother struggling to raise her children to thrive without coming undone in an era of turbulent intersecting crises.

With camera in hand, Raboteau goes in search of birds, fluttering in the air or painted on buildings, and city parks where her children may safely play while avoiding pollution, pandemics, and the police. She ventures abroad to learn from Indigenous peoples, and in her own family and community, she discovers the most intimate examples of resilience. Raboteau bears witness to the inner life of Black womanhood, motherhood, the brutalities and possibilities of cities, while celebrating the beauty and fragility of nature. This innovative work of reportage and autobiography stitches together multiple stories of protection, offering a profound sense of hope.

Dark Laboratory is a groundbreaking investigation of the Caribbean as both an idyll in the American imagination and a dark laboratory of Western experimentation, revealing secrets to racial and environmental progress that impact how we live today. In 1492, Christopher Columbus arrived on the Caribbean Island of Guanahaní to find an Edenic scene that was soon mythologized. But behind the myth of paradise, the Caribbean and its people would come to pay the price of relentless Western exploitation and abuse. In Dark Laboratory, Dr. Tao Leigh Goffe embarks on a historical journey to chart the forces that have shaped these islands: the legacy of slavery, indentured labor, and the forced toil of Chinese and enslaved Black people who mined the islands’ bounty—including guano, which, at the time, was more valuable than gold—for the benefit of European powers and at the expense of the islands’ sacred ecologies.

Braiding together family history, cultural reportage, and social studies, Goffe radically transforms how we conceive of Blackness, the natural world, colonialism, and the climate crisis; and, in doing so, she deftly dismantles the many layers of entrenched imperialist thinking that shroud our established understanding of the human and environmental conditions to reveal the cause and effect of a global catastrophe. Dark Laboratory forces a reckoning with the received forms of knowledge that have led us astray.