Margaret

Renkl

Nonfiction Writer

NYT Contributing Writer

Travels from: Nashville, TN

“She generously shares her wisdom in a safe and effectual way.” — U of Lynchburg, 2021

Margaret Renkl is the author of Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss (2019) and Graceland, at Last: Notes on Hope and Heartache From the American South (2021), and The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year, (2023), which won the 2024 Southern Book Prize. Her next book, Leaf, Cloud, Crow: A Weekly Backyard Journal (October 2024), is a companion to The Comfort of Crows that offers 52 writing prompts and plentiful advice for studying the natural world. Renkl is contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, where her essays appear each Monday. A graduate of Auburn University and the University of South Carolina, she lives in Nashville.

Growing up in Alabama, Renkl was a devoted reader, an explorer of riverbeds and red-dirt roads, and a fiercely loved daughter. In Late Migrations, she traces a tender and honest portrait of her complicated parents—her exuberant, creative mother; her steady, supportive father—and of the bittersweet moments that accompany a child’s transition to caregiver. Gorgeously illustrated by the author’s brother, Billy Renkl, Late Migrations won the 2020 Reed Award for Environmental Writing and was A TODAY Show #ReadWithJenna Book Club Pick.

Renkl’s next book, Graceland, At Last, brings together more than 60 of her New York Times columns, which offer a weekly dose of natural beauty, human decency, and persistent hope. In a patchwork quilt of personal and reported essays, Renkl highlights some other voices of the South, people who are fighting for a better future for the region. A group of teenagers who organized a youth march for Black Lives Matter. An urban shepherd whose sheep remove invasive vegetation. Church parishioners sheltering the homeless. Throughout, readers will find the generosity of spirit and deep attention to the world, human and nonhuman, that keep readers returning to her columns each Monday morning. Graceland, At Last won the 2022 Southern Book Prize and the 2022 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.

In The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year, Renkl follows the creatures and plants in her backyard during the course of a year. As we move through the seasons—from a crow spied on New Year’s Day, its resourcefulness and sense of community setting a theme for the year—what develops is a portrait of joy and grief. Joy at the ongoing pleasures of the natural world: “Until the very last cricket falls silent, the beauty-besotted will always find a reason to love the world.” And grief at a shifting climate, at winters that end too soon, at songbirds growing fewer and fewer.

Along the way, we also glimpse the changing rhythms of human life. Grown children, unexpectedly home during the pandemic, prepare to depart once more. Birdsong and night-blooming flowers evoke generations past. The city and the country where Renkl raised her family transform a little more with every passing day. How can one person make a difference amid such destabilizing changes?

Margaret's Featured Titles

Our Wild Neighbors

To have any hope of addressing the international biodiversity crisis, we will need to cooperate at a global level to address climate change, preserve and restore wildlife habitat, eliminate poaching, and make other difficult systemic changes in the way human beings live. It’s daunting even to consider. But the first step toward making those changes is also the easiest and the most natural: We need to think about wild creatures in a new way—not as “others” but as kin.

Finding Hope in the Age of Climate Change

We have come to the point that the effects of climate change are already so clear and so dramatic that it is almost impossible to think about the ravages that lie ahead if humanity can’t reform itself in time. How to keep going in the face of those fears is the great challenge of our age, but there are many, many reasons for hope.

Fitting a Creative Practice Into the Demands of Everyday Life

I was 57 when my first book was published. When people ask me how I managed to write a book at last, I tell them I finally learned to stop waiting for the perfect time to write it.

The Challenges and Obligations of Writing From Memory

A story constructed from memory is a slippery creature: evanescent, not wholly reliable. That’s OK. There are ways to inspire long-stored memories to present themselves, and there are ways to interrogate the truth of those recollections. There are also ways to signal to a reader when a memory isn’t entirely clear but tells us something important anyway.

Waking Up to the Natural World

Nature is the Appalachian Trail, and nature is the Alaskan National Wildlife Reserve, and nature is the Great Barrier Reef, but nature is also all around us, even in the most pristinely managed suburbs, even in the deepest city canyons and the scruffiest abandoned lots. To wake up to nature, the only thing you have to do is put your screen down and take your earbuds out. Pay attention to what passes beyond your window, to what is rushing toward the trees as you pass. Wherever you are, sit still and watch. The natural world will present itself to you.

Making Your World a Wildlife Sanctuary

There are so many simple ways we can make life better for the species who share our ecosystems. We can be careful about what we pour down the drain or allow to wash into nearby streams. We can bring our own bags and water bottles when we shop or eat out, knowing that single-use plastic is the leading source of microplastics in rivers. But we can also consciously create wildlife-friendly spaces by planting natural food sources , by providing shelter and nesting sites, by keeping clean water available on the hottest days. Even a city balcony can be a sanctuary for our wild neighbors.

Wrestling With What It Means To Be a Southern Writer

Maybe being a Southern writer is only a matter of loving a damaged and damaging place, of loving its flawed and beautiful people, so much you have to stay there, observing and recording and believing, against all odds, that one day it will finally live up to the promise at its own good heart.

A Writer Is a Mockingbird

Writers are mockingbirds, listening to the world—to other birds’ songs, to the backup beeping of construction trucks, to the click of car doors being locked—and then mixing and combining them, taking the sounds of the world and making a new sound all their own. But to be a mockingbird, you have to listen. You have to look.

“Margaret Renkl was a perfect match for our organization of lifelong learners with special interests in memoir and nature. Her warm personality and passion for beauty in the world captivated our audience. She gets five hundred stars.” — Auburn University, 2024

“Margaret’s passion for writing and the environment was apparent. She had a very engaged audience during her reading and offered excellent insights into writing creative nonfiction with participants.” — Looking Glass Rock Writers Conference, 2023

“I could listen to Margaret’s reflections on any topic—particularly politics, culture, and the flora and fauna in our backyards. She brings a beautiful combination of seriousness and fun, wisdom and humility to conversations about how we participate in the world around us.” — Center for Rural Strategies

“Margaret Renkl’s brilliance and heart come through in her visits with students. She generously shares her wisdom in a safe and effectual way, one that invites students to ask questions and learn from her. Her reading was inviting and comfortable while being artistic and intellectual. Undoubtedly, she is one of the kindest guest writers I have encountered.” — U of Lynchburg

“Thank you for your keen observations of the natural world, and for communicating them to other people in ways that allow them to “wake up to nature” as well. The future of the world depends, in part, on people rediscovering their connections with other organisms and ecosystems, which means your work is also a valuable contribution to conservation efforts.”— Wolf River Conservancy

Interviews with Margaret

Margaret’s NYT Essays

Honors, Awards & Recognition

Read With Jenna Pick
Winner of the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay
Reed Environmental Writing Award
Two-Time Winner of the Southern Book Prize Award