Author Description

Now in its sixth year, this acclaimed series has become a leading showcase for contemporary nature writing. The annual collections present the best of the genre, highlighting both new and distinguished voices. With this volume, American Nature Writing, published for the past five years by Sierra Club Books, begins a new association with Oregon State University Press. The eighteen selections gathered here show the rich variety of human responses to natural places. Readers encounter a wide range of settings: a village on the Baja peninsula; the high mountain trails of Glacier National Park in Montana; the undersea kelp forests near La Jolla, California; the Chihuahuan desert in New Mexico; the high-altitude ecosystems of the Tibetan Plateau; and the wilds of northern Alaska. That a Civil War battlefield and an Arizona prison cell are the settings for two essays demonstrates the surprising vitality of this literature of place.