Leah Thomas’s Q&A: “My earliest memory involved a priest, a rabbi and a firefighter”

The environmentalist discusses the poetry collection Black Nature, the Real Housewives franchise and Cori Bush.

Leah Thomas was born in St Louis, Missouri, in 1994. She worked for the US National Park Service and the outdoor clothing company Patagonia before becoming a full-time environmental activist.

I was two and my mum was following her mother in the car, because she was acting a little strange. My grandma had a seizure in her car and then drove into a lake. There happened to be a firefighter, a priest and a rabbi in the area and they saved her. It changed her life: she befriended the priest and the rabbi, and became a Buddhist.