Nick Neely

Nick Neely grew up south of San Francisco, in the oak and chaparral on the bayside of the Santa Cruz Mountains. He 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 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, where he taught in the Undergraduate Writing Program. His work is published or forthcoming in journals such as The Kenyon Review, The Threepenny Review, The Southern Review, The Missouri Review, The Harvard Review, FIELD, Ninth Letter, Ecotone, River Teeth, and Orion. He’s currently working on a collection of essays, “Coast Range”, that explores natural history in California and Oregon; and on a memoir, “Town Landing”, about a summer in the urban wilds along the Blackstone and Seekonk Rivers of Pawtucket, Rhode Island, the birthplace of the American Industrial Revolution. This spring he is in residence at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology on the Oregon coast. He is also the recent recipient of the 2015 John Burroughs Nature Essay Award for his essay “The Book of Agate”.