Better Writing, Less Waste

Open to Everyone!

In his book Total Garbage: How We Can Fix Our Waste and Heal Our World, journalist Edward Humes employs engaging investigative storytelling to link our waste crisis to bigger issues in the humanities like ethics, community, culture, and our relationships with each other and the environment. He’ll talk about his writing process and how the everyday choices we make and the systems we rely on contribute to the overwhelming problem of waste.

Edward Humes is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and narrative nonfiction writer who spends months embedded in the lives of his subjects in order to investigate and research his incredible stories about the justice system, science, nature, and sustainability. His seventeen books include Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation, Mississippi Mud, No Matter How Loud I Shout: A Year in the Life of Juvenile Court, and Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash.

In Garbology, the prequel to Total Garbage, Humes focused on what we throw away – and how we are so much more “trashy” than we imagined. Humes’s message of reducing and reinventing our approach to what we roll to the curb each week resonated strongly with student and sustainability-minded audiences, who selected Garbology as a “One Book” community read over 30 times, including at colleges such as Georgia Institute of Technology, California State University Northridge, Rowan University, University of Central Florida, and such cities as Portland, OR, Pittsburgh, PA, Palos Verdes, California, and Atlanta, GA.

Now, Humes returns with Total Garbage to tackle the wider world of waste: in which our fossil fuel power plants squander two-thirds of our energy, our gasoline-powered cars waste 80 percent of our fuel, and 40 percent of our food—and all the energy, water, chemicals and fertilizer used to produce it—goes to waste. From Georgia to Minnesota, Maine to California, Humes found the game-changers and ordinary people tackling this waste and the environmental catastrophes it drives—all while saving (and even making) money doing it.

Humes is also a popular true crime writer. His bestseller, Mississippi Mud, a murder mystery set in a historic Gulf Coast city steeped in corruption, is currently being developed as a series by Immersive Pictures. Burned: A Story of Murder and the Crime That Wasn’t, is a gripping investigative narrative into a young mother’s sentencing for killing her three children in a house fire, and the flawed, so-called “forensic fire science” behind it. Humes’s investigative work in Burned helped lead to her release and took readers inside the world of the California Innocence Project that challenged the conviction. His latest in the genre, The Forever Witness, is about the disappearance and murder of a young couple, a 32-year-old cold-case investigation, and the emergence of a revolutionary new crime-fighting science, genetic genealogy. It’s also being developed as a documentary streaming series.

Humes received his Pulitzer Prize for his newspaper coverage of the military, and a PEN Award for Nonfiction for No Matter How Loud I Shout: A Year in the Life of Juvenile Court. He has taught writing, journalism, and literary nonfiction at graduate and undergraduate levels, and has written for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Sierra Magazine, and Los Angeles Magazine. A graduate of Hampshire College, he lives in Southern California with his family, two rescued greyhounds, and a rescue collie.