Six months after students were introduced to author Julie Carrick Dalton, with the selection of her novel as our All Community Read, they got to meet her in person and ask all their questions about the book, her writing process and more.

The former beekeeper visited campus on November 3 to meet with students and deliver a special evening presentation for the campus community about her dystopian work, Brooks’ 11th annual ACR, The Last Beekeeper.

“Julie is a passionate speaker about fiction in the age of climate crisis,” said Director of Sustainability Shanel Antunes, introducing Dalton in the Center for the Arts theater. “Her stories blend environmental awareness with deeply human themes, exploring what it means to care for our planet for each other and for the future that we’re all shaping.”

Addressing the students assembled for the hourlong evening talk, Dalton declared, “We all have something important to offer when it comes to speaking up to protect our planet and to fight for climate justice.” Writing about climate is her way of “processing my fears, but also my hopes,” she said. “Writing allows me to try and fail and try again to imagine a better world. …Stories invigorate my own hope because it brings me to audiences like you.”

Prior to her talk, Dalton spent the day on campus with students in AP Studio 2D Art, Literature & Composition: American Voices, and the Human Impact on the Environment class, as well as meeting members of Brooks’ No Planet B student group for lunch.

Currently the 2025 writer-in-residence at the University of Delaware, and on the teaching faculty of Drexel University's Creative Writing MFA program, Dalton also owns a small organic farm in New Hampshire. Her “eco-fiction,” as she calls it, draws from her expertise in both of these realms: writing and environmental science.

“We are slowly, every single year, losing more of our pollinators,” she told the Brooks students gathered before her that Monday night. “If we lost all the bees, we would lose, and this is real, a third of the food on Earth.”

Taking students inside her writing process, Dalton explained, “Thoughts were colliding in my head, like, ‘What would the world look like if we actually lost them all?’ and that was where the recipe for The Last Beekeeper was born.”

See photos from Dalton’s visit.

Describing that ideation as a privilege, Dalton said, “[But] to imagine an entire world, to populate it, [that’s] also a power. …I believe that we all have the power to make a difference.”

“We need the scientists,” she added. “We need the engineers. We need the innovators hard at work [and the] storytellers: We need you, with your infinite possibilities.”

As she looked out into the audience, Dalton explained, “I'm thinking, ‘Is there a student out there somewhere, maybe somebody in this room, who is going to read one of these books one day and say, ‘I can make that… I can build that technology. I can build that solution.’?”

“There are dozens, maybe hundreds, of unrealized climate solutions in this room right now,” she said. “And if we all lean into our skill sets, whether it's teaching, storytelling, engineering or construction, we can make a difference in our own spheres of influence.”

Closing her talk, Dalton leveled, “There are no superheroes coming to save us. We collectively, individually, must be the heroes that we're all waiting for.

"So, I'm going to leave you with two questions,” she added. “What's your superpower? And how are you going to unleash it to save the world?”