Jarid Manos is Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Great Plains Restoration Council (GPRC), which is based in Fort Worth and Houston, Texas. He is also an author, health advocate, and youth worker. Through his guidance, GPRC has helped found the Ecological Health movement which, in a “bloodstreams and creeks” approach, helps young people “heal themselves through healing the Earth” and facilitates self-intervention symbiotically with ecological leadership through critical thinking and physical work. A vegan athlete, he also serves on the Board of Directors of the Black Vegetarian Society of Texas.
As a new American writer, he is the author of Ghetto Plainsman, his first book, which took him eight years to write. He is is currently in year five on his second book, Her Blue Watered Streets: An American Novel, with an expected due date in 2014. He believes that writers should honor their readers’ time with exacted craft and conscious, fully inhabited writing, and that, at its best, American literature can be transformative through an experiential story itself. Theme-wise, he is particularly interested in the connected story threads within our blasted Earth and the urban badlands. In summer 2013, he will also launch a two-year blogstory, Fear and Loving: Where the Ocean Meets the Streets, that follows his journey to becoming an adept diver as a parallel track of why we are afraid to go deep in our own lives, at a time when the oceans are dying and rising seas begin to threaten the world. In his view, the ocean and the prairie are two halves of a whole.
Manos is a Huffington Post contributor and has also appeared in the New York Times, Dallas Morning News, Denver Post, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, USA Today, Smithsonian, Congressional Quarterly, Houston Chronicle, Albuquerque Journal, New York Nightly News, Grist, and NBC 5, among many others. He is a featured guest speaker at universities, jails, churches (and other places of faith), organizations, events, conferences, businesses, chambers of commerce, and schools nationwide.
Contributions to Humans & Nature:
- Jail Me—Or Not
A response to “How is nature critical to a 21st century urban ethic?”
Noteworthy Links:
- JaridManos.com
Learn more about Jarid Manos’ work and writing.
