david gessner

Soaring with Fidel is now out in paperback.

I will be teaching a writing workshop at Provincetown Arts during the week of June 22nd. To learn more, please visit here.

Listen to my essay on wildness for This I Believe on NPR's All Things Considered.

The essay, "Learning to Surf," originally published in Orion, won the 2006 John Burroughs Award for Best Essay.

Nice excerpt of Soaring in the Boston Globe Magazine this past Sunday April 29.

Early Reviews of Soaring:
"A grand adventure, not just for birders and nature lovers." Kirkus Reviews

"Gessner writes beautifully, with grace and humor."
Publishers' Weekly

For more information, visit my new website, ospreyworld.com. The site features maps, photos, and cartoons from the trip, as well as an interactive forum and listings of talks I'll be doing up and down the East coast this upcoming spring and summer.

In March 2006 Orion magazine featured "Learning to Surf," an essay about my move south, pelicans, the growth of my daughter, and, of course, learning to surf.

In Fall '05 Beacon Press published The Prophet of Dry Hill: Lessons from a Life in Nature Bill McKibben writes of Prophet: "This book is an enormous gift, an act of preservation as important as any chunk of land purchased by The Nature Conservancy."

Tired of Eco-Bullshit? Read "My Green Manifesto"

Watch my (wild) new YouTube Movie

Visit my new osprey website at www.ospreyworld.com

For a film on how I keep my fine figure: Skiing the Beach

David Gessner is the author of several books, including The Prophet of Dry Hill and Return of the Osprey, which was chosen by the Boston Globe as one of the top ten nonfiction books of the year and the Book-of-the-Month club as one of its top books of the year. The Globe called it a "classic of American Nature Writing." His latest book is Soaring with Fidel, in which he follows the osprey migration from Cape Cod to Cuba and Venezuela and back. In 2006 he won a Pushcart Prize and in 2007 he won the John Burroughs Award for Best Natural History Essay. He has taught environmental writing at Harvard, and is currently an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, where he edits the national literary journal, Ecotone.

NOTES:

This winter I put the finishing touches on my novel set on Cape Cod, The Thing Itself. I am hoping it begins to make its way out into the world this spring.

I am also considering turning Wormtown, my black humor memoir of testicular cancer in Worcester, MA, into a graphic novel.

The essay "Benediction" was featured in the the 2006 Pushcart Prize Anthology. In a review on Feb 15th the Wall Street Journal wrote: "Another mandatory gem is David Gessner's vibrant reckoning of his relationship with his mentor, the great Harvard literary scholar W. Jackson Bate. Mr. Gessner describes his undergraduate enthusiasm for the writings of Thomas Wolfe, once himself a Harvard student. But it is Bate's lectures on English literature that truly galvanize Mr. Gessner. At one point, Bate compares "the worst excesses of postmodernism and deconstruction to those of neoclassicism:a dry emphasis on reason, on mind; a focus on games." Bate imagines the possibility of a "new romanticism," and Mr. Gessner is stirred to try a "new Romantic" writing project of his own, befriending Bate along the way. But the course of the friendship - and of the writing -does not always run smooth. Mr Gessner's memoir is both touching and surprising."

To see an excerpt of this piece, published in the Georgia Review, click here.