Department of English

• Thursday, April 2, 2026 - 6:30pm to 8:00pm

Kleinman Energy Forum, Fisher Fine Arts Library, 4th floor (220 S 34th St)

Salt lakes are some of the world’s most extraordinary ecosystems, but nearly all of them—from the Great Salt Lake to the Aral Sea—are drying up, a harbinger of dust storms, rising sea levels, and worsening human health. In this dazzling love letter to strange and delicate waters and a moving odyssey into her own identity, Caroline Tracey takes readers across the American West and to Mexico, Argentina, and Kazakhstan to document salt lakes, their loss, and the efforts underway to save them. She explores how the lakes have reflected the fast–changing natural world through Mormon diaries, Soviet realist novels, and Australian Aboriginal paintings. And she unravels the lakes’ lessons for her own life as she finds queer love and a sense of home in an imperfect world. An unforgettable coming–of–age story and an exquisite work of nature writing, Salt Lakes is a moving call to fight for all that is fragile in our lives.

Caroline Tracey’s work in English and Spanish has appeared in the New Yorker, New York Review of Books, and elsewhere. She holds a PhD in geography from University of California, Berkeley, and lives in Tucson, Arizona.

This event is co-sponsored by the Department of Landscape Architecture, the Center for Latin American and Latinx Studies, GSWS, the Wolf Humanities Center, and AmLit.

For more information, including notes on accommodations, visit this link: https://www.design.upenn.edu/events/caroline-tracey-salt-lakes