Frederick Livingston is an ecologist currently working in the prison-to-school pipeline, growing native plants with incarcerated people for restoration projects across the American West. Born at the southern tip of the Salish Sea in Olympia, Washington, his work in experiential education and peacebuilding has taken him across the world, from Peace Corps in rural Tanzania to the United Nation’s University for Peace in Costa Rica, and beyond.
Since his 6th grade debut on local-access television performing “Ode to a Chair”, Frederick’s work has appeared in scientific journals, dozens of literary magazines, and public spaces. He has been the featured poet of California Quarterly and nominated for several Pushcart and Best of the Net awards. He is the author of the poetry collection “The Moon and Other Fruits” as well as the upcoming title “Trees are Bridges to the Sky”, which won the Prism Prize for Climate Literature.
Long Bio
I grew up accepting the world as it was, pushing my toy lawnmower over graves at the cemetery across the street simply because it was the nearest greenspace. When my overworked single mother sent me to grandmother’s forest, I spent days ankle deep in creeks stinking of skunk cabbage. I thought I knew everything, so I drank that water and paid with aching hours.
The last kid on my block to learn how to read, to ride a bike, to swim, I would become an educator familiar with freedom. My uncle dragged me up switchbacks reluctantly zigzagging until I started spending weeks then months in northwest forests that slowly became a refuge from anxious hardscapes.
Studying environmental science in college, I measured toxins and degrees of warming, but not the alchemy of grief. I was wrapped in thorns and told those were my best years. Walking down to the cold sea I was saved by purple starfish on jagged rocks who promised me not everything on Earth is broken.
I followed this glimmer to Himalayan rooftops where I met a sky viscous with stars and wrinkled faces with brighter eyes. I learned Swahili from farmers rooted in solidarity and uncertainty. When the monsoon rotted my neighbors’ potato crop, when every continent I visited mentioned unraveling weather, when my own home snowed ashes, the sky lost its distance.
Moving to a city, I built fires with children in suburban forests, overwintered as a sock model guiding tourists to breweries by bicycle, led American students to East Africa to slaughter chickens and drink unpasteurized milk. I wrote more and mumbled into microphones and watched poets pull their heart from their chest, hand it to the audience still beating and dripping.
Eventually I found a university heady with coffee flowers and snakes. I walked food as a bridge between ecology and human needs alongside global dreamers who watered my suspicions of human potential. This abundant jungle questioned the scarcity and misanthropy I had inherited.
At a fog-cursed farm along the California coast I used a butterknife to ease carrot seedlings into salty soil and calculated the minutia of regeneration. Proving to myself hands can heal helped me question the fusion of humans and harm.
Through sitting in silence, I grew closer to karma’s dark muck, the cacophony of shifting selves inside me. I found the macrocosm of my own inborn fear and shame reflected in my culture. The mess of human behavior bewilders me less and the mechanics of repair became more apparent. I plant seeds of peace or more violent brambles claim the bare ground.
Often stumbling, I practiced education and poetry as vessels to carry the faith I had gathered. Both use metaphors to invite new ways of seeing and their power draws from the speaker’s self-realization. Teaching and writing of Earth was never about convincing anyone, but of giving voice to the parts of myself that still believe in beauty.
I moved to the grass-seed capital of the world and became an ecologist bringing native plants into prisons. I do not know where I will grow, but I carry a pocket of seeds, dreams, an ache everywhere. A fruit tree in the body of a wanderer.