Steven F. White
https://www.microcosmssacredplants.org/Steven F. White was educated at Williams College and received his Ph.D. from the University of Oregon. White is the recipient of a Lannan Foundation residency and two Fulbright grants for a literary project in Chile and curricular development as a Senior Specialist in Nicaragua. When he was 22, his interest in sacred plants motivated him to visit a Cofan community in the Ecuadorean Amazon in 1977. During a transformative sabbatical year in 1993-94, he studied South American shamanism and actively participated in the Santo Daime Church on the island of Santa Catarina in southern Brazil. He is the co-editor of Ayahuasca Reader: Encounters with the Amazon’s Sacred Vine (Synergetic Press, 2016), which won an Independent Publishers Book Award. His essay on Ceiba pentandra appears in The Mind of Plants: Narratives of Vegetal Intelligence. He did an ecocritical study for his edition of Seven Trees Against the Dying Light by Nicaraguan poet Pablo Antonio Cuadra (Northwestern University Press, 2007) and translated the ethnobotanical poems of Esthela Calderón in The Bones of My Grandfather and Paper Beehive (Amargord, 2018 and 2022). He edited El consumo de lo que somos: muestra de poesía ecológica hispánica contemporánea (Amargord, 2014) and served as guest editor of a special issue on ecology and Latin American literature of Review: Latin American Literature and the Arts (2012). His research with Microscopy Specialist Jill Pflugheber Microcosms: A Homage to Sacred Plants of the Americas was presented as an exhibition at the Brush Art Gallery in 2020 at St. Lawrence University, where White taught Latin American literature and film for 34 years and was a founder of the Caribbean and Latin American Studies interdisciplinary program. He currently serves on the editorial board of the journal Plant Perspectives.
