Theodore Richards
Theodore Richards (he/him) is an educator, poet, and philosopher, and the founder of The Chicago Wisdom Project. His work is dedicated to re-imagining education and creating new narratives about our place in the world. He has received degrees from various institutions, including the University of Chicago and The California Institute of Integral Studies, but has learned just as much studying the martial art of Bagua; teaching in various settings and students; and as a traveler from the Far East to the Middle East, from southern Africa to the South Pacific. He is the author of eight books and numerous literary awards, including two Nautilus Book Awards and three Independent Publisher Awards. He lives on the south side of Chicago with his wife and three daughters.
nonfiction
What Happened to Icarus
Encountering the Unfathomable in a World in Crisis
Trade paperback, ebook / April 2026
I want to know what happened to Icarus after his wings melted away, when he fell into the fathomless sea. This is where the story begins.
Ours is undeniably a world on fire. The seas are rising, forests burn, geopolitical strife accelerates, and our inner lives are increasingly unmoored, in collapse. Many of us no longer know our place in this world. Like Icarus, we are in free fall. Tracing the author’s travels through some of the most despairing, remote, and beautiful regions of the Earth, What Happened to Icarus is both a call to action and a call to remember—to remember who we are, so that we may fall in love with the world again, even as we despair in our descent.
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“Favoring commentary-rich establishing scenes and narration that blends observation with reflection, Richards uses each experience on the road as raw material for extended reflections on topics such as capitalism and community. Encounters with fascism, displacement, and poverty repeatedly tested his assumptions. By the final chapter, the book turns away from travel as a moral strategy, arriving instead at an ethic of care that reframes earlier wanderings as preparation, rather than as a solution. Richards’ work uses memories of world travel to examine loneliness, belonging, and the costs of modern independence.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“What Happened to Icarus is not a good book; it is a great one. It names something that is key to a generation and to men in particular; in many ways, it’s something unnameable, but Richards puts stories as well as words to it. This book is a quest, a pilgrimage. It speaks honestly to the religious and spiritual failures of the West along with so much else, not unlike the beat poets. But Richards travels the full, round, world—and not in an American automobile, but on foot and in buses full of peasants. What Happened to Icarus is a bigger vision for today; Richards is the Jack Kerouac of these times.”
—Matthew Fox, author of Original Blessing
“On a lonely planet, in a far-flung corner of the Universe, there lives a human, digging in the depths of his soul, so that his species can heal and survive. Theodore Richards’ What Happened to Icarus is a deeply personal, poetic and philosophical book that weaves together real life narrative, social reckoning, cultural reflection and spiritual imagination. It is filled with the heart, honesty and human spirit that is essential for us to find our way. We are falling, but this is a vital part of the story…a story of love and loss and becoming.”
—Joshua Gorman
“Theodore Richards combines the insight of a philosopher, the lyricism of a poet, the wisdom of a sage, and the savvy of a point guard. His vivid journey is both relatable and revelatory as he navigates the difficulties of intimacy in a world of disconnection, conscience in a context of injustice, and cosmology in a land of disenchantment. Richards’s story is a compelling call for aliveness, connection, solidarity, and reverence for the beauty and depths of the soul, the sea, and the starry world.”
—Drew Dellinger, author of Love Letter to the Milky Way
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