Margaret Renkl is the author of Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss and Graceland, at Last: Notes on Hope and Heartache From the American South. She is also a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, where her essays appear each Monday. Her work has also appeared in Guernica, Literary Hub, Oxford American, River Teeth, and The Sewanee Review, among others. 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 (in brief essays) 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 is an assured and memorable debut. Her next book, Graceland, At Last, brings together 60 of Renkl’s New York Times columns, which offer a weekly dose of natural beauty, human decency, and persistent hope in a sparkling new collection. 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.
Braided into the overall narrative of her work, 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.
Margaret’s Authors Outside Profile: 
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
