Nick Neely grew up south of San Francisco, in the oak and chaparral on the bay side of the Santa Cruz Mountains. His first book, Coast Range: A Collection from the Pacific Edge (Counterpoint 2016), essays, was a finalist for the 2017 John Burroughs Medal for natural history writing and CLMP’s Firecracker Award in Creative Nonfiction. For his second book, Alta California: From San Diego to San Francisco, a Journey on Foot to Rediscover the Golden State (Counterpoint 2019), he walked for twelve weeks on the route of first overland Spanish expedition into California in 1769. Alta California was an LA Times bestseller.
Nick received an MA from the Literature and Environment program at the University of Nevada, Reno, in 2009, and afterward spent six months living in the woods of Oregon’s Rogue River Canyon as the recipient of PEN Northwest’s Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency. Following stints at High Country News and Audubon magazine, he completed an MFA in nonfiction from Hunter College and an MFA in poetry from Columbia University. His work is published in magazines such as Orion, Mother Jones, Kenyon Review, The Threepenny Review, The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, The Missouri Review, Harvard Review, Fourth Genre, FIELD, Ninth Letter, Ecotone, and River Teeth. New Michigan Press published a chapbook of his lyrical animal essays, Chiton, and Other Creatures. He has held residencies at the Djerassi Resident Artist Program and the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology on the Oregon coast. He is also the recipient of the 2015 John Burroughs Nature Essay Award, an AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award (for his article on the Cassia crossbill), and a UC Berkeley-11th Hour Food and Farming Journalism Fellowship.
Nick lives with his wife, the painter Sarah Bird, and their kids in La Grande, Oregon, where he is an Assistant Professor of English/Writing at Eastern Oregon University and directs EOU’s low-residency MFA with a special concentration in Landscape, Ecology, and Community (the LEC).
You can reach him at nneely[at]eou.edu.
Nick Neely 