AMAZONIAN ACTIVIST: DEFENDER OF THE RAINFOREST – MEMOIR

JONATHAN LETHEM is the bestselling author of 12 novels, including Brooklyn Crime Novel (Ecco), The Arrest, The Feral Detective, The Fortress of Solitude, and Motherless Brooklyn, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. He currently teaches creative writing at Pomona College in California.

MITCH ANDERSON is the founder and executive director of Amazon Frontlines, which supports Indigenous peoples' struggles to defend their rights to land, life, and cultural survival in the Amazon rainforest. A native of the Bay Area, he is Nemonte Nenquimo’s partner. They have two young children.

NEMONTE NENQUIMO, a leader of the Waorani people, is one of the most forceful voices in climate change activism and the co-founder of the Ceibo Alliance. She is a winner of the 2020 Goldman Environmental Prize and was named to Time's "100 Most Influential People of 2020" list. Born into the Waorani tribe of Ecuador’s Amazon rainforest, Nenquimo was taught about medicinal plants, foraging, oral storytelling, and shamanism by her elders. At age 14, she left the forest for the first time to study with an evangelical missionary group in the city. She returned and embraced her culture, and since then she has fiercely battled loggers, miners, oil companies, and missionaries. She has led the alliance of Indigenous nations across the Upper Amazon and her people to a landmark victory against Big Oil, protecting more than a half-million acres of primary rainforest.