Set during the pre-vaccine Covid-19 pandemic, Garth Greenwell’s novel Small Rain follows its protagonist through emergency hospitalization and recovery. It’s been described as a text that “unfurls internally, in the consciousness of a character” (The New Yorker). Much has already been said about the relationship among the protagonist’s precarious physical body, the medical infrastructure through which his body is treated, and his intellectual and emotional life. Far less attention has been paid to the way Greenwell introduces everyday creatures that live in close proximity to humans – a sparrow, an oak tree, a squirrel, a dogwood, to name a few – into his text as his protagonist begins to heal. These, too, figure within the poetic framework of the book.

Greenwell will read passages from the fourth section of his novel. The following conversation will reflect upon poetic, visual, metaphysical and ecological ways to think through the book, and how it engages our particular American moment and its version of nature.

About the panelists

Garth Greenwell is the author, most recently, of Small Rain, which won the 2025 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award. A Guggenheim Fellow, his writing on literature, art, and music appears widely, including in The New Yorker, The Guardian, Harper’s, and elsewhere; he also writes the Substack newsletter To a Green Thought. He is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University.

Patricia Dailey, Associate Professor in English and Comparative Literature, is at work on a book about the arboreal sublime, another one on parentheses, a global seminar on ‘Trees’, a collaborative exhibit “Thinking Treely” (2024) at Columbia’s Rare Book and Manuscript’s library, and a co-edited volume with Jay Gao, Thinking Treely. This work has been awarded a Climate Humanities Grant, a Just Humanities Grant, and a Heyman Center fellowship. Her publications include Promised Bodies: Time, Language, and Corporeality in Medieval Women's Mystical Texts, and recent articles “The Elemental Sublime” forthcoming (2026, “Planting Sublimity” in Medieval Ecocriticisms (2025), “Inventing Experience: Medieval, Psychedelic, Postmodern” in SAQ (2025). She has translated works by Antonio Negri, Jean-François Lyotard and Giorgio Agamben.

Subhashini Kaligotla, Barbara Stoler Miller Associate Professor, Art History and Archaeology, is a poet and an art historian of premodern South Asia. She is author of the poetry collections My Life Closed Twice and Bird of the Indian Subcontinent and the art history monograph Shiva’s Waterfront Temples. She teaches at Columbia, dividing her time between New York City and Hyderabad.

Lynnette Widder, Professor of Practice in Sustainability Management, is the author of Year Zero to Economic Miracle: Hans Schwippert and Sep Ruf in Postwar West German Building Culture (gta, 2022); and Ira Rakatansky: As Modern as Tomorrow (William Stout, 2010). Her research has been supported by the NY State Council on the Arts, the Architectural League, DAAD and the Graham Foundation; she received fellowships at the Institut für Kunstwissenschaft, MacDowell and the Institute for Ideas and Imagination.