The Huntington’s Rose Garden at sunset. Photo by Brandi Shawn-Chaparro. | The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens.
Craig Santos Perez, the first Pacific Islander to win a National Book Award, will read from his ecopoetry collection Habitat Threshold at sunset in The Huntington’s Rose Garden on April 14 — an outdoor encounter with verse about climate change and ecological loss in a region still marked by the January 2025 Eaton Fire.
Perez, an Indigenous Chamoru from the Pacific Island of Guåhan (Guam), writes about the environmental crises threatening Pacific Island communities: militarism, rising seas, displacement, and the erasure of Indigenous relationships with land and ocean. He does not write about California wildfires. But his themes — vanishing habitats, environmental injustice, the cost of ignoring a wounded planet — carry weight minutes from neighborhoods where the Eaton Fire destroyed more than 9,000 structures.
“There is an activist dimension to Pacific Islander ecopoetry because it has the power to develop environmental literacy as well as inspire empathy and positive change,” Perez said in a statement released by The Huntington, where he holds the R. Stanton Avery Distinguished Fellowship for 2025-26.
During his yearlong residency, Perez is writing a monograph titled Pacific Islander Ecopoetry: Indigenous Knowledge, Environmental Justice, and Climate Change, to be published by the University of Arizona Press, according to The Huntington. His research draws on the institution’s archival collections, including rare maps of the Pacific Islands and materials related to Guam, Hawai’i, Samoa, and the Marshall Islands, according to The Huntington’s fellowship description.
In an interview on the Green Dreamer podcast, Perez described finding that poetry becomes “a great pathway through which students can not only learn about literature, but also develop their own environmental literacy,” adding that writing about a place teaches people “more about the layered ecologies” of where they live.
Perez won the 2023 National Book Award for Poetry for from unincorporated territory [åmot], a collection that explores how storytelling can become a form of healing from the wounds of colonialism, militarism, and environmental injustice, according to the National Book Foundation. He is the author of seven books of poetry and the co-editor of nine anthologies. His academic monograph, Navigating Chamoru Poetry, received the Modern Language Association Prize for Studies in Native American Literatures, Cultures, and Languages.
The reading takes place from 5 to 6:30 p.m. in The Huntington’s Rose Garden, which spans three acres and contains more than 3,000 plants, according to The Huntington. Tickets are $25. The Huntington is at 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino. For information, call (626) 405-2100 or visit huntington.org.
“When we expose these issues, that creates a way for us to not only cultivate empathy for our struggles, but also to establish alliances and solidarity with other communities who have experienced similar kinds of environmental justice issues,” Perez told Grist in 2023.
POETRY READING: ECOPOETRY IN A TIME OF CLIMATE CHANGE Date & Time: Tuesday, April 14, 2026, 5:00–6:30 p.m. Venue/Sponsor Address: 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino, CA 91108 (The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens — Rose Garden). Venue/Sponsor Phone Number: (626) 405-2100. Visit: Website:https://www.huntington.org/event/poetry-reading-ecopoetry-time-climate-change
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