After 15 years off the grid in rural Colorado, my family and I now live in White Salmon, Washington, on the north side of the Columbia River Gorge. A lapsed biologist, I specialize in stories about conservation and global change, but I’ve covered subjects ranging from theater to wrestling to my preschooler’s conviction that Bilbo Baggins is a girl. My book Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction, a critical history of the modern conservation movement, was published by W.W. Norton in 2021 and was named one of the best books of the year by the Chicago Tribune, Smithsonian, Booklist, and other publications.
I’m proud to be a longtime contributing editor of High Country News, an independent magazine that produces some of the finest journalism in the American West, and the lead editor of its Conservation Beyond Boundaries series.
My writing has appeared in National Geographic, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, and I’m a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. My work has won several national honors, including two AAAS/Kavli Science Journalism Awards and inclusion in four Best American anthologies, and it’s been generously supported by the Alicia Patterson Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, and the Food and Environment Reporting Network.
I’m also the co-editor of The Science Writers’ Handbook: Everything You Need to Know to Pitch, Publish and Prosper in the Digital Age, published by Da Capo Press, and the author of The Science Writers’ Essay Handbook: How to Craft Compelling True Stories in Any Medium. As a project editor for The Atlantic from 2017 through 2023, I edited features for the Planet section and the Life Up Close series.
I’m aided in many tangible and intangible ways by my husband Jackson Perrin, a teacher, tinkerer, and director of Gorge MakerSpace. The now-teenage Mx. Baggins keeps everything in perspective. (And if you’re wondering about my last name, it rhymes with "my house.")
