Rochelle Johnson

Rochelle L. Johnson received the 2026 John Burroughs Nature Essay Award and the 2025 Georgia Review Prose Prize for her “Phantom Pains,” which also was aggregated by Long Reads, Memoirland, and the international scientific magazine Nature in its “Nature Briefing.” A recipient of the Carnegie Foundation’s Idaho Professor of the Year Award and the 2024 Outstanding Achievement in the Humanities Award from the Idaho Humanities Council, Rochelle is the author of many creative and scholarly works, including Passions for Nature: Nineteenth-Century America’s Aesthetics of Alienation. She also has co-edited several volumes, including Thoreau in an Age of Crisis, and published essays about Thoreau, Emerson, and others. A leading scholar of 19^th-century naturalist Susan Fenimore Cooper, Rochelle and her co-editor have edited three volumes dedicated to Cooper’s work. Rochelle’s research has earned fellowships from the Beinecke Library, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and several other organizations. Rochelle holds the Bernie McCain Chair in the Humanities at the College of Idaho, where she teaches environmental studies, and the 2026 Robert Frost Chair at the Bread Loaf School of English, where she teaches literature and creative writing. She is a past president of both the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) and The Thoreau Society. Learn more at: RochelleJohnsonWriter.com.