Selected Reporting & Essays

Listening for a wandering voice, for Oxford American magazine

For Orion magazine. What do we find on peeling back the world's skin? An essay on frog dissection, books of secrets, electrical experiments, Frankenstein's monster, & mystery.

For Sierra magazine. Hiking through a forest of climate migrants in North Carolina's Black Mountains.

For Sierra magazine. Billionaires are flying to space in fossil-fueled rockets to escape the carbon-laden atmosphere and enjoy a few minutes of microgravity. Meanwhile, the highest temperatures ever recorded are searing the earth.

For Sierra magazine. Out of the pandemic, into metamorphosis. On the occasion of the Brood X emergence.

For Oxford American magazine. I set forth on foot following this tug of energy that urged my legs to walk. The circle of my life, small as it was, widened outward.

For Sierra magazine. Teaching the connections in a time of crisis.

For In These Times magazine. It is often the case now that we do not know of an animal’s or insect’s or plant’s existence—do not ever hear its name—until it is almost gone.

For The New York Times Magazine. In which I, of course, recommend crickets.

for A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia (UGA Press 2019) & featured in Southern Humanities Review. A poem about a fish called the chucky madtom.

For Sierra magazine. Words from my wet land.

For Orion magazine. In the coal fields of Eastern Kentucky, how might art nurture an economy that feeds not only mouths but the hearts of people & the places they live in?

For Orion magazine. A meditation on the poet’s life in trees.

For Orion magazine, & reprinted in The Utne Reader. Fossils & fossil fuels in the Guadalupe Mountains of West Texas.

For Lapham's Quarterly. While modern astronomy has widened our understanding of the universe, this scientific culture has severed our deep intimacy with the cosmos. Selected by Sy Montgomery for The Best American Science & Nature Writing 2019.

For Oxford American magazine.

For Lapham's Quarterly. How Native Hawaiians traversed the cosmos—then lost their way in translation.

For The RS 500. The Flying Burrito Brothers, Nudie suits, manifest destiny, & Hollywood.

For Terrain.org. A weaving of seven words: Strawberries, Moon, June, Sustain, Snake, Shelter, Rhododendron. Nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

For the Oxford American magazine. The author shares her fascination with the astounding array of native freshwater mussels in the Tennessee River watershed.

For the Oxford American magazine. In which the author rides a train from El Paso, Texas to Lynchburg, Virginia. Listed as notable in Best American Travel Writing.

For Terrain.org. A story of interdependence, told through American soil.

For The RS 500. An essay in response to The Doors’ L.A. Woman (1971).

For Still: The Journal. A meditation on uprooting and letting go. Nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

For Oxford American magazine. An exploration of the force that animates, at Knoxville, Tennessee’s strange music festival, Big Ears.