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 (Milkweed Editions, 2019) and Graceland, at Last: Notes on Hope and Heartache From the American South (Milkweed Editions, 2021). Her new book, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year, will be released in October 2023. 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 Authors Outside Profile:

Graceland, At Last

Milkweed Editions |

September 14, 2021

Nonfiction

Winner of the 2022 Southern Book Prize

Winner of the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay

An Indie Next Selection for September 2021

A Book Marks Best Reviewed Essay Collection of 2021

A Literary Hub Most Anticipated Book of 2021

A Country Living Best Book of Fall 2022

A Garden & Gun Recommended Read for Fall 2021

A Book Marks Best Reviewed Book of September 2021

From the author of the bestselling #ReadWithJenna/TODAY Show book club pick Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss

For the past four years, Margaret Renkl’s columns have offered readers of The New York Times a weekly dose of natural beauty, human decency, and persistent hope from her home in Nashville. Now more than sixty of those pieces have been brought together in this sparkling new collection.

“People have often asked me how it feels to be the ‘voice of the South, ‘” writes Renkl in her introduction. “But I’m not the voice of the South, and no one else is, either.” There are many Souths–red and blue, rural and urban, mountain and coast, Black and white and brown–and no one writer could possibly represent all of them. In Graceland, At Last, Renkl writes instead from her own experience about the complexities of her homeland, demonstrating along the way how much more there is to this tangled region than many people understand.

In a patchwork quilt of personal and reported essays, Renkl also 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.

From a writer who “makes one of all the world’s beings” (NPR), Graceland, At Last is a book full of gifts for Southerners and non-Southerners alike.

American South / Appalachia, Climate Change, Environmental Concerns, Female Author, Food Sovereignty, Journalism, Nonfiction, Sustainability, The Great Outdoors, The Natural World

Late Migrations: A Natural History Of Love And Loss

Milkweed Editions |

July 9, 2019

Nonfiction

Named a Best Book of the Year by New Statesman, New York Public Library, Chicago Public Library, and Washington Independent Review of Books

Southern Book Prize Finalist

From New York Times contributing opinion writer Margaret Renkl comes an unusual, captivating portrait of a family–and of the cycles of joy and grief that inscribe human lives within the natural world.

Growing up in Alabama, Renkl was a devoted reader, an explorer of riverbeds and red-dirt roads, and a fiercely loved daughter. Here, in brief essays, 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.

And here, braided into the overall narrative, Renkl offers observations on the world surrounding her suburban Nashville home. Ringing with rapture and heartache, these essays convey the dignity of bluebirds and rat snakes, monarch butterflies and native bees. As these two threads haunt and harmonize with each other, Renkl suggests that there is astonishment to be found in common things: in what seems ordinary, in what we all share. For in both worlds–the natural one and our own–“the shadow side of love is always loss, and grief is only love’s own twin.”

Gorgeously illustrated by the author’s brother, Billy Renkl, Late Migrations is an assured and memorable debut.

American South / Appalachia, Campus Reads, Climate Change, Community Reads, Environmental Concerns, Female Author, Food Sovereignty, Nonfiction, Sustainability

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.

The Link Between Happiness and Creativity

Our ancestors didn’t think of creativity as a side gig. A quilt was meant to keep a family warm. It was meant to give a new practical use to the unworn bits of worn-out clothes. But our family quilts were never simply warm and never simply practical. They were also beautiful, and making them brought their makers happiness. Expressing our own creativity—whether through painting or gardening or singing or dancing or writing or, yes, needlework—is one of the ways we bring meaning to our lives.

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.

Writing as an Act of Forgiveness

The greatest blessings the written word can offer often come when we find a way to write ourselves into a state of empathy for someone who has harmed us in some way. It isn’t easy, but it can be done. Here’s how.

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.

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.

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.

“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, 2021

“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, 2021

“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, 2020

Interviews with Margaret

Margaret’s NYT Essays

Honors, Awards & Recognition

Graceland, At Last, winner of the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay
Read With Jenna Pick
Reed Environmental Writing Award
Southern Book Prize AwardPEN America Literary Award Winner