Eric Dean Wilson is the author of After Cooling: On Freon, Global Warming, and the Terrible Cost of Comfort (Simon & Schuster, 2021), which the New York Times calls “ambitious [and] delightful” and Amitav Ghosh calls “essential reading for the planetary crisis.” After Cooling is a work of literary nonfiction that interweaves the science and history of the powerful refrigerant (and dangerous greenhouse gas) Freon with a meditation on how to live meaningfully and morally in a rapidly heating world.
Wilson’s writing has appeared in TIME, Esquire, Orion, Tin House, the Los Angeles Review of Books and BOMB, among other publications. He is currently working on a collection of essays about urban green space, queer ecology, and ecological mourning.
Wilson is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and American Literature at Wagner College, Staten Island. He earned his doctorate in English with a certificate in American Studies at the Graduate Center, CUNY for his work on environmental literature. His dissertation, “The Personal and the Planetal: Essaying the Ecological,” examines how contemporary American personal essays in an ecological mode can help us better understand the boundaries of the self in literary nonfiction. Reading works by Robin Wall Kimmerer, John Francis, and David Wojnarowicz, Wilson’s dissertation invokes queer ecology as a method for understanding the self as more varied and communal than Western liberalism assumes. His dissertation won the English Program’s Alumni and Doctoral Faculty Prize for the Most Distinguished Dissertation of the Year.
At the Graduate Center, Wilson was a Teaching Fellow in the Mellon Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research through the Center for Humanities. Previously, he taught climate-themed writing, creative writing, environmental literature, and environmental justice to undergraduates at Queens College, FIT, The New School, and Ramapo College of New Jersey. He holds an MFA in creative writing from The New School’s MFA program.
Originally from Memphis, Tennessee, he now lives in Flatbush, Brooklyn.
