About the Literary Awards
Since 1926, the Association has awarded the prestigious John Burroughs Medal to the author of a distinguished nature book. The Association added the annual Riverby Award for young readers in 1988 and the John Burroughs Nature Essay Award in 1994. The awards recognize works of excellent writing about the natural world. They have to helped propel the careers of many outstanding authors and have expanded their audiences. Award winners have included Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, John McPhee, Roger Tory Peterson, and Peter Matthiessen, among many others.
Cash prizes are now given to the winner of each award. Nominations are accepted each summer through a specific deadline for each award. To submit a nomination, click on the link below under the award category.
LITERARY AWARDS CELEBRATION
On the first Monday of April, we gather each year in New York City to present the John Burroughs Medal, the John Burroughs Nature Essay Award, and the Riverby Award to authors and illustrators of the winning works.
Check back to register for Awards Celebration Luncheon, April 1, 2024
2024 AWARD WINNERS:
Halcyon Journey: In Search of the Belted Kingfisher, published by Oregon State University Press in 2022.
HALCYON JOURNEY: In Search of the Belted Kingfisher More than one hundred species of kingfishers brighten every continent but Antarctica. Not all are fishing birds. They range in size from the African dwarf kingfisher to the laughing kookaburra of Australia. This first book to feature North America’s belted kingfisher is a lyrical story of observation, revelation, and curiosity in the presence of flowing waters.
The kingfisher—also known as the halcyon bird—is linked to the mythic origin of halcyon days, a state of happiness that Marina Richie hopes to find outside her back door in Missoula, Montana. Epiphanies and a citizen science discovery punctuate days tracking a bird that outwits at every turn. The female is more colorful than the male (unusual and puzzling) and the birds’ earthen nest holes are difficult to locate.
While the heart of the drama takes place on Rattlesnake Creek in Missoula, the author’s adventures in search of kingfisher kin on the lower Rio Grande, in South Africa, and in London illuminate her relationships with the birds of Montana. In the quiet of winter, she explores tribal stories of the kingfisher as messenger and helper, pivotal qualities for her quest. For all who love birds or simply seek solace in nature, Halcyon Journey is an inviting introduction to the mythic and mysterious belted kingfisher.Marina Richie
is a nature writer living in Bend, Oregon. Growing up in a National Park Service family with a bird-loving father influenced her passion for protecting wildlife and wild places. Halcyon Journey in Search of the Belted Kingfisher (Oregon State University Press) also won a 2022 National Outdoor Book Award and Foreword Indies Award. Richie’s articles, essays, and poetry appear in literary and popular magazines, blogs, newspapers, and in three book collections. She has authored two children's books: Bird Feats of Montana and Bug Feats of Montana. Beyond putting words on a page, Richie gives environmental presentations, teaches nature writing workshops, nurtures a bird and pollinator-friendly garden, and serves on the board of the Greater Hells Canyon Council. Her education includes an M.A. in Journalism from the University of Montana and a B.A. in Biology from the University of Oregon. Richie has worked as a journalist, writer of interpretive signs, wildlife viewing coordinator, and communications director for wildlife initiatives. She writes a bi-monthly blog of prose and poetry called “Kingfisher Journey.”Announcement Coming Soon!
Announcement Coming Soon!
2023 AWARD WINNERS:
Bayou D’Arbonne Swamp: A Naturalist’s Memoir of Place, published by the Louisiana State University Press in 2022.
Bayou D’Arbonne Swamp addresses the vibrant natural, cultural, and social history of a north Louisiana swamp. Kelby Ouchley grew up near Bayou D’Arbonne Swamp, and he later spent much of his professional life as a wildlife biologist and naturalist overseeing the national wildlife refuge created from much of the area. His deep personal and professional connections to the landscape give him valuable insight into the enormous changes that have struck the swamp over the last century and the reasons behind this transformation. In this fascinating narrative, Ouchley offers a kaleidoscopic view of Bayou D’Arbonne Swamp that reveals its unique past and distinctive flora, fauna, and people.
Although these are stories of a particular swamp, they tell us much about issues facing other wetlands, as well as prairies, mountains, and deserts, when viewed through an ecological, social, and historical lens. Ouchley aims to foster an awareness of the environmental impacts of human decisions that encourages readers to consider ecological choices in their daily lives. The result is a work that presents an intimate and multilayered natural history of Bayou D’Arbonne Swamp that extends beyond the edges of the ever-changing Louisiana wetland, informing the environmental history of Louisiana, conservation, and ecological change.
Kelby Ouchley
Kelby Ouchley is a biologist who managed National Wildlife Refuges for the US Fish & Wildlife Service for 30 years. He has lived and worked in a host of diverse natural areas across the southern landscape. Much of his career was devoted to establishing new refuges and reforesting thousands of acres in the Lower Mississippi Valley. His avocation in recent years has been natural history writing. Since 1995 he has written and narrated "Bayou-Diversity," an award-winning conservation program for public radio. His seven books include natural histories of Louisiana, a historical novel, and a comprehensive work on alligators. He has received the Louisiana Governor’s Conservationist of the Year award and other lifetime achievement awards. Kelby and his wife Amy live in Rocky Branch, Louisiana, in a cypress house surrounded by white oaks and black hickories, where he is most at home on the edge of a southern swamp.
The John Burroughs Association is pleased to announce Christina Rivera has won the 2023 John Burroughs Nature Essay Award for “The 17th Day,” published by Terrain.org on January 1, 2022.
The 17th Day
In “The 17th Day” Christina Cogswell adroitly twines the story of Tahlequah, the female orca who in 2018 swam a thousand miles lifting and pushing her dead female calf, with Cogswell’s personal saga of illness and miscarriage resulting from heavy metals and industrial chemicals in her body. Southern Resident orcas in the waters off Washington and British Columbia, of which Tahlequah is part, are afflicted with similar toxins; nearly 70 percent of pregnant orcas lose their calves before birth or shortly after. Cogswell, a mother of two, is forced to live with the agonizing possibility that both she and Tahlequah poisoned their breastfed offspring.
Embarked on a years-long journey of detoxification, Cogswell hones her fears and sorrow into frank and passionately lively prose free of rant or self-pity, her factual assertions rooted in science and medicine. She takes heart and hope in the whales themselves, whose “snappy clicks and bright whistles” she hears in her kitchen from a microphone submerged offshore. Tahlequah gave birth to a new calf recently, and the very next day, in a rare mass gathering, all 73 members of the Southern Resident orcas swirled, breached, and slapped tails, bringing tears to the eyes of observers. Sixty years after Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Christina Cogswell re-sounds the alarm.
CHRISTINA RIVERA COGSWELL
Christina Rivera Cogswell is a divemaster and author from Colorado whose childhood was bordered by the coastlines of the Pacific Ocean. She credits the fragmentation of her writing to her two young children and catches her breath from parenthood in the high altitudes of the Rocky Mountains and amidst the charred red rocks of the Moab desert. Her essays are published in Orion Magazine, The Kenyon Review, Terrain.org, Catapult, and Bat City Review, among others. She is the recipient of artist grants and residencies from Millay Arts, Wellstone, and Craigartan. Christina’s debut book of essays My Oceans was selected as a finalist for The Siskiyou Prize for New Environmental Literature, longlisted for the Graywolf Prize in 2022, and is forthcoming from Curbstone Books, an imprint of Northwestern University Press, in the spring of 2025.
Braiding Sweetgrass for Young Adults: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants
By Robin Wall Kimmerer, Adapted by Monique Gray Smith, with illustrations by Nicole Neidhardt, published by Zest, an imprint of Lerner Publishing
We are thrilled to welcome back Robin Wall Kimmerer, the 2005 John Burroughs Medalist for her book Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses and winner of the 2014 John Burroughs Nature Essay Award for “Council of the Pecans” which appeared in Orion magazine in 2013. This essay was later included in her best-selling work Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. With the Riverby Award, she now holds all three Burroughs awards.
As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer is trained to use the tools of science to ask questions of nature. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces plants and animals as our oldest teachers. Kimmerer brings these lenses of knowledge together to show that when we listen to the languages of other beings, we are capable of understanding the generosity of the earth and learning to give our own gifts in return.
Adapted by Monique Gray Smith with illustrations by Nicole Neidhardt, Braiding Sweetgrass for Young Adults highlights how acknowledging and celebrating reciprocal relationships with the earth results in a wider, more complete understanding of our place and purpose. They skillfully bring Braiding Sweetgrass to life and to fresh audiences.
Luminous Written and illustrated by Julia Kuo, published by Greystone Books
Author-illustrator Julia Kuo presents a poetic exploration of bioluminescence, the light made from living things, and its many forms including fireflies and foxfire, fungi and glowworms, deep-sea fish and vampire squid. Her stunning art portrays a young child and adult discovering this natural phenomenon. With simple lyrical text and informative sidebars, this story introduces readers to science and nature and illuminates how truly wondrous the world is.
A Warbler’s Journey By Scott Weidensaul, with paintings by Nancy Lane, published by The Gryphon Press
In eloquent language and original oil paintings, A Warbler’s Journey tells the story of a tiny yellow warbler’s epic flight from her winter home habitat, crossing the Gulf of Mexico, followed by thousands of miles to her breeding ground home in the northern tundra. This story shows the incredible stamina and resourcefulness birds need for migration, threatened as never before by climate change and habitat destruction. Three children and their families along a perilous route demonstrate some of the many ways in which humans can support migrating birds like the warbler.
2022 Award Winners:
Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-Human Landscape, by Cal Flyn, published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House, in 2021.
Islands of Abandonment addresses the long history of human indifference to natural processes, and nature's responses to them. Over the course of two years, Cal Flyn visited a dozen places, starting in her native Scotland. Each has been the site of a great environmental atrocity; each has many analogs and equivalents in other times and other places.
Flyn's prose is vivid; simply as a piece of travel writing, her book is exceptional, and challenges comparison with Bruce Chatwin or V.S. Naipaul. But in its scope and ambition, it calls to mind two great 19th Century travel narratives: Humboldt's Views of Nature and Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle—works that radically revised our understanding of nature and of biological, geological, and metrological science.
Between Flyn's book and theirs stands Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, which revealed that human history had altered natural history to an extent unimaginable to Humboldt or Darwin: a wave of extinctions, changes in climate and sea level, and a worldwide, imperishable legacy of contamination. Islands of Abandonment addresses the global crises of our time: the End of Nature, the Sixth Extinction, the Anthropocene Era. There is possibly no more thorough, convincing, and synoptic consideration of those things than hers.
But her book is also something else. Its paraphrasable content cannot be considered independently of its essentially musical and cumulative structure. The first four chapters form a single movement—In Absentia. The next two are the second movement, Those Who Remain. This four-two pattern is then repeated. Chapters 7-10 are The Long Shadow; 11-12 are Endgame. The twelve individual chapters are each subtitled. The first one, about a group of seven slag heaps southwest of Edinburgh, is The Waste Land; the last one, about Salton Sea, California, is The Deluge and the Desert. The theme of each chapter is woven into the larger symphonic design, an interlocking variation of motifs.
The two shorter sections—chapters 5 and 6 and 11 and 12—focus not on natural environments but on manmade ones—cities or towns—and their human ecology. They are grim—each grimmer than its predecessor: Detroit Michigan and Patterson New Jersey, then Plymouth, which had been the capital of the Caribbean island of Montserrat until it was obliterated by a volcanic eruption in 1995, and Slab City, an improvised community of drifters, fugitives, and dead-enders, none of them boring or entirely in their right minds, in Salton Sea, California.
The first movement of the book, chapters 1-4, is largely hopeful. It describes places where humans have created environments where humans cannot live. Nature improbably reclaims them, revegetating, reforesting, and rewilding waste places, DMZs, and radioactive zones. In the second group, chapters 7-10, the environmental atrocities are more dire, less reversible.
The book is a work of sustained brilliance, rich in information and insight.
CAL FLYN
Cal Flyn is a writer from the Highlands of Scotland, close enough to Loch Ness to swim in its waters in summer. Her work has evolved from researcher to reporter to freelance writer. In 2016, Flyn published her first book, Thicker Than Water, a story of violent colonial clashes on the Australian frontier. She now focuses on long-form journalism and creative nonfiction and is particularly interested in the boundary between human and non-human, and the ethics of conservation. Her latest book, Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape, portrays twelve abandoned places around the world and explores what nature gets up to when we are not around. It has been shortlisted for several of awards, including the Baillie Gifford Prize for nonfiction and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year. Flyn contributes to publications that include Granta, The Guardian, and The Wall Street Journal. She lives in Scotland’s Orkney Islands.
“WILDFLOWER SEASON” by Carolyn Kuebler, published by The Massachusetts Review in its Fall 2021 issue.
Carolyn Kuebler is not a biologist or a naturalist, or even what we call a “nature writer.” A novelist and essayist, she is the longtime editor of a literary review. She encounters nature in the way most of us do, episodically, on and off—and not in a special setting. Instead, her remarkable essay centers on Wright Park, a scrappy woodland abutting what realtors disparagingly call a “transitional neighborhood” in small-town Vermont. It is no old-growth forest or mountain wilderness. Nor did Kuebler spend a protracted time alone there, studying the park’s flora in depth. But on her routine walks, she did learn to identify wildflowers with the aid of a pocket-size field guide.
Then, in the spring of 2020, the pandemic imposed on her what she describes as a “radical simplification of daily life.” And while she was learning of the horrors that Covid was creating in the larger world, her walks in the small park connected her not only with that sorrow, but with the joy of being alive.
Her essay is framed by Vermont’s wildflower season, from late March and early April, when trout lilies and jack-in-the-pulpits emerge from the matted, damp, brown leaves, to late September, when the spectacular purple blooms of New England asters announce summer’s end.
It is both a song of praise to under-appreciated, ordinary, familiar places and a wide-ranging meditation on the meaning of our individual and collective lives here on Earth.
CAROLYN KUEBLER
Carolyn Kuebler is a writer of fiction and essays and edits the New England Review at Middlebury College. Her writing has been published in The Common, The Literary Review, Copper Nickel, and The Massachusetts Review, among others. Prior to her work at NER, Carolyn contributed dozens of book reviews to publications including City Pages and the Star Tribune in Minneapolis, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, and Rain Taxi, where she was a founding editor. Originally from Allentown, Pennsylvania, Carolyn now lives in Middlebury, Vermont, where she serves as Justice of the Peace and an activist with 350 Vermont.
Begin with a Bee Liza Ketchum, Jacqueline Briggs Martin, Phyllis Root, with illustrations by Claudia McGehee, published by University of Minnesota Press
Begin with a Bee is a quintessential Riverby Award winner. Written in an inviting voice with bright lyrical prose, readers come along on the life cycle of the rusty-patched bumble bee and her colony. Stunningly intricate, colorful, and accurate woodcuts illustrate each phase of the bees’ cycle, while also drawing attention to the symphony of life surrounding it. Begin with a Bee is rich with ecological details and associations that lend depth of understanding and context to our bees’ world. Silently the reader is invited to find many creatures and flowers noted in the text which serves to reinforce the beauty and interconnectedness of ecosystems. Begin with a Bee elegantly reminds us how valuable and tenuous one life is. This is a book that will be returned to again and again, for its beauty, its magic, and its information.
The Leaf Detective Heather Lang, with illustrations by Jana Christy, published by Calkin Creek, an imprint of Boyds Mills & Kane
“We had already been to the moon and back and nobody had been to the top of a tree,” observed Meg Lowman, the subject of the fascinating and inspiring biography The Leaf Detective. Lowman aimed to be the first scientist to do so in the rainforest—a goal that demanded overcoming obstacles ranging from male professors not admitting her into their classes to figuring out how to climb towering trees crawling with venomous insects and snakes. Heather Lang tells Lowman’s remarkable story—which includes groundbreaking scientific discoveries about the rainforest canopy and its importance to all life on earth, as well as inspiring people around the world to conserve rainforests—with elegant economy and crystalline prose. Engaging illustrations sparkle. Layered text throughout, and an excellent infographic in the back matter round out this stunning, uplifting book.
Over and Under the Canyon Kate Messner with art by Christopher Silas Neal published by Chronicle Books At first glance, one might think that a desert is just a flat, hot, dry place. But anyone who has visited desert habitats knows differently: it’s not always flat, not always hot, and always, deceptively rich and exciting. Over and Under the Canyon takes us along, in partnership with a young boy and his mom, through an incredible desert slot canyon. As they walk, mom deftly points out what others might miss, inviting the boy, and the reader, to look more closely. She teaches us to be careful where we step, and to look closely before we reach out with eager hands. This small picture book is a fabulous introduction to the creatures and plants of this unique ecosystem and gently teaches ecological concepts. It captures facts well but also some of the magic of the desert as we feel the heat, the thirst, the awe and the wonder, and we revel at the end in the brilliance of a desert sky.
2021 AWARD WINNERS:
Sprout Lands: Tending the Endless Gift of Trees, by William Bryant Logan, published by W. W. Norton & Company, 2019
SPROUT LANDS: TENDING THE ENDLESS GIFT OF TREES
Sprout Lands delicately follows an intimate exchange between people and trees, tracing a harvest method through 10,000 years. Through human history, people have tended their woods as gardens. Their tools are the axe and great patience, as they rotated fields of forests through stages of growth that enabled them to cut parts of the tree without killing the whole tree. “The old Indo-European word for tree, *varna*, also means to cut,” Logan writes, as he introduces us to nearly-forgotten techniques of pruning known as “coppice” and “pollarding.” These cuts fostered new growth on old stems, allowing people to sustainably collect wood to build their homes, boats, baskets, hedges, and tools, and to feed their animals with forage greens. Along the way coppiced and pollarded trees lived longer than their uncut cousins, while the coppice woodlands themselves supported diverse collections of wild plants and animals, among the most productive forests on the planet. Logan, an arborist consumed with recapturing and seeking out old arts of pruning, takes us over the globe in search of the remains of coppiced and pollarded trees hundreds of years old. He finds beech and ash copses in Spain, woodlands tended with fire coppicing by California’s native peoples, oil palm groves in the grasslands of Sierra Leone, and ancient red pine and cedar woods of Japan. His book—and the trees themselves—offer hopeful stories of regeneration, even immortality, in response to wounding, the cut of the pruner’s knife. “To keep a coppice woodland is an art,” Logan writes. His is to explore forests long shaped by human cultures and to tell us in words of love and practical wisdom of a hybrid human-natural history. People shape woodlands and trees shape civilizations. In rediscovering ancient human practices, what Logan calls “remembering the future,” our ancestors arise from the past and trees appear as we have never seen them before, beyond their gravitas, as beings of rare vigor and creativity. “To study how trees grow is to admire not only their persistence but their imagination. Live wood just won’t quit.” Logan’s voice is poetic, reverential, and visionary, and his plea is as sharp as the arborist’s knife. “For 10,000 years, trees were our companions and our teachers. They brought us this far, and perhaps they will carry us on.”
WILLIAM BRYANT LOGAN
William Logan has spent the last five decades getting to know trees, as a writer, arborist, and teacher, first in coastal California and the Sierra Nevada, then for the last three decades in the regenerative forests of New York. Logan is an award-winning arborist and writer, and founder and president of the Brooklyn-based tree company Urban Arborist. His firm trains and cares for the pollards and aerial hedges in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and has planned, planted, and currently cares for numerous landscapes and gardens at historic and significant properties in the Tri-State area. Logan lectures widely, from the Arnold Arboretum in Cambridge to the Huntington Library in Los Angeles and internationally, about the relationship between people and trees.
Logan’s earlier books are Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth, Oak: The Frame of Civilization, and Air: The Restless Shaper of the World. Dirt inspired an award-winning documentary and is often quoted. His essay “The Things Trees Know” was excerpted from Sprout Lands before the book’s publication and, published in Orion, won the 2020 John Burroughs Nature Essay Award. Logan has written for the New York Times, Orion, Emergence, Natural History, House Beautiful, and numerous other publications, winning numerous Quill and Trowel Awards from the Garden Writers of America. He is on the faculty at the New York Botanical Garden and earlier taught poetry in the New York City schools and nature writing at Sarah Lawrence College.
“DIS-EASE: Documenting change and nurturing life in an uncertain world” by Kate Olson, published by Earth Island Journal in its Spring 2020 issue.
Ordinarily, essays about our fragile and changing-for-the-worse environment focus on what outside of oneself is being lost. Occasionally, they turn their attention to what climate change will mean for humanity in general. It is relatively rare for an essay to do both, an essay that, in the John Burroughs tradition, fuses both. In “Dis-Ease” Kate Olson develops both in a very personal way. We are with her at the start when she talks to a Lobsterman who is concerned about the future of the sea around him: “The sea urchins are gone, starfish, gone, clams in his favorite cove, gone, lobsters moving to funny spots.” Furthermore, the monarch butterflies have virtually disappeared. It is only at the end of the essay that she lets us see a monarch in the sky over Casco Bay in Maine.
We are used to reading about matters such as these. But then the very personal moves in. Olson is pregnant. She asks what her world will be like and adds, what will her baby's world be like. Everything is warming in Maine. Ticks have invaded and, after her first child becomes a toddler, “tick control” becomes a nightly chore. It's one thing for Greenland Glaciers to be melting; this is common knowledge. But then, as she is walking in her yard before Thanksgiving, she sees a flash of red. Here the interweaving of self and object is perfect: “My heart swelled at this sweet pleasure, unbidden on a gray November day. Then my gut clenched. I felt a burning in my throat. Raspberries? I thought. In November? In Maine?”
Except for the passing—i.e., not flying overhead but disappearing, shot and netted to extinction—of Passenger Pigeons, John Burroughs saw only the returning of life to Slabsides each Spring. Olson sees these changes everywhere around her. But we see her emotional response. This is no cold analysis of the passing of the natural world that we have known, but an emotional response that brings this change home. Here is how she speculates on the impermanence of life on earth and her life within it: “The false certainty of tomorrow is a veil we willingly don to preserve our sanity. The difference is that now, not only can I not count on my own life continuing, but I cannot count on other forms of life continuing.” What will this world be like for her children? “I do not know what my baby's world will be like.” It is moments like this—little gems of insight—that humanize her observations and bring emotion into what might otherwise be just disembodied facts. Olson masterfully merges self and other.
KATE OLSON
Kate Olson is a writer, scholar, and activist whose work explores the edges between social, cultural, and ecological systems. Her current research documents the observations and experiences of climate change among farmers, fishers, and foresters in Maine and is shared through the multimedia project, Living Change. She will receive her PhD in Sociology from Boston College in May 2021. She has written for Earth Island Journal, BuzzFeed News, Civil Eats, Maine Farms Journal, as well as several scientific journals. Olson grew up on the edge of the Great Plains in South Dakota but is learning to call the dense forests and waterways of Maine home.
I am the Elwha Lori Peelen with illustrations by Laura Timmermans,
published by Strong Nations Publishing, Inc.
Longneedle Anne Marshall Runyon with her illustrations,
published by the North Carolina Office of Archives and History and distributed by the University of North Carolina Press
Ocean Speaks: How Marie Tharp revealed The Ocean’ biggest secret Jess Keating and illustrated by Katie Hickey,
published by Tundra, an imprint of Penguin Randomhouse
Secrets of the Loon Laura Purdie Salas with illustrations by Chuck Dayton,
published by the Minnesota Historical Society Press
2020 AWARD WINNERS:
Entangled: People and Ecological Change in Alaska’s Kachemak Bay, by Marilyn
Sigman, published by the University of Alaska Press, 2018
Entangled: People and Ecological Change in Alaska’s Kachemak Bay chronicles Sigman’s quest for wildness and home in Alaska. The naturalist writes lyrically about the history of natural abundance and human notions of wealth—from seals to shellfish to sea otters to herring, halibut, and salmon—in Alaska’s iconic Kachemak Bay.
This is a place where people and the living resources they depend on have ebbed and flowed for thousands of years. The forces of the earth are dynamic here: they can change in an instant, shaking the ground beneath your feet or overturning kayaks in a rushing wave. Glaciers have advanced and receded over centuries. The climate, like the ocean, has shifted from warmer to colder and back again in a matter of decades. The ocean food web has been shuffled from bottom to top again and again.
In Entangled, Sigman contemplates the patterns of people staying and leaving, of settlement and displacement, nesting her own journey to Kachemak Bay and of ancient peoples from Asia to the southern coast of Alaska. Along the way she weaves in scientific facts about the region as well as the stories told by Alaska’s indigenous peoples. It is a rhapsodic introduction to this stunning region and a siren call to protect the land’s natural resources in the face of a warming, changing world.
Marilyn Sigman’s writings are based on her childhood in Montana and decades in Alaska as a wildlife biologist, environmental educator, and naturalist. Her essays have appeared in numerous publications and have been selected for inclusion in the Alaska Humanities Forum-sponsored Salmon Shadows project. She retired in 2019 from her University of Alaska faculty position as a marine education specialist where her work in marine science outreach was honored by the 2019 Alaska Ocean Leadership Award. Sigman’s commitment to the environment includes serving on the boards of several conservation and natural resources organizations based in Alaska. Her education includes a B.A. in Human Biology from Stanford University and an M.S. in Wildlife Management followed by an MFA in Creative and Literary Arts, both from the University of Alaska. She lives in Homer, Alaska.
“The Things Trees Know: A look inside their secret lives” by William Bryant Logan, published by Orion in its Winter 2018.
William Logan's close observant eye, original metaphors, and scientific accuracy merge to give one a delightful and informative look inside trees to discover what they know. From closely observing a Plane Tree in Brooklyn, an ancient Juniper in Spain, and a Willow branch that had broken off upstream in a brook and then had rooted itself downstream to sprout into a tree, he switches the tenor of the essay to a riff on the jazzist Charlie Parker's version of John Coltrane's “My Favorite Things.” This yoking together of trees and jazz with scientific accuracy characterizes this essay. His inventiveness is buttressed with references to scientific studies of trees' behaviors; out of these he raises then answers questions about trees' growth processes. The science and the figurative language complement each other. One not only sees “what trees know” but also feels, through metaphor, the trees' uniquenesses.
Every paragraph of Logan's essay brims with a loving intimacy with trees and breadth of understanding that has evolved from long and numerous firsthand experiences. Merging both science and direct observation, Logan’s inquisitive mind explores the different ways different species grow: Spruces, Firs, and other conifers; Oaks, Maples, Horse Chestnuts, Beeches, Elms, etcetera. We follow his eye from seeds to trunks to branches to decay, death, and regeneration.
Beautifully written, the essay provides large and rich account not merely of a particular species but of a global life-form, and not merely in its current distribution and diversity, but over the course of its evolutionary history. This is natural history on the grand scale.
William Bryant Logan, a certified arborist and founder and president of the Brooklyn-based tree company Urban Arborists, has spent the last three decades working on trees. He is on the faculty of the New York Botanical Garden and at Sarah Lawrence College has taught nature writing. Logan is the author of Oak: The Frame of Civilization (2005), Air: The Endless Shaper of the World (2012), and Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth (1995), the last of which was made into an award-winning documentary.“The Things Trees Know" was excerpted from his 2019 book Sprout Lands: Tending the endless Gifts of Trees, before publication. Logan has won numerous Quill and Trowel Awards from the Garden Writers of America and was a contribution editor to House Beautiful, House and Garden, and Garden Design magazine, as well as a regular garden writer for the New York Times.
A Children’s Guide to Arctic Butterflies Mia Pelletier with illustrations by Danny Christopher,
published by Inhabit Media
Hawksbill Promise Mary Beth Owens,
Published by Tilbury House
The Magnificent Migration Sy Montgomery with photos by Roger and Logan Woods, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 
My Mighty Journey John Coy with illustrations by Gaylord Schanilec,
published by Minnesota Historical Society Press
A Stone Sat Still Brendon Wenzel,
published by Chronicle Books
Unseen World Written and illustrated by Hélène Rajcak and Damien Laverdunt,
published by What on Earth Books
2019 AWARD WINNERS:
A Wilder Time: Notes from a Geologist at the Edge of The Greenland Ice, by William Glassley, published by Bellevue Literary Press, 2018
A Wilder Time: Notes from a Geologist at the Edge of The Greenland Ice is a rich literary account of six expeditions to Greenland, where the author sought (and found) Earth’s earliest signs yet of plate tectonics, the slow-motion movement and collisions of continents. Anchored by deep reflection and scientific knowledge, A Wilder Time is a portrait of an ancient, nearly untrammeled world that holds the secrets of our planet’s deepest past, even as it accelerates into our rapidly changing future. The book bears
the literary, scientific, philosophic, and poetic qualities of a nature-writing classic, the rarest mixture of beauty and scholarship.
William E. Glassley is a geologist at the University of California, Davis, and an emeritus researcher at Aarhus University, Denmark, focusing on the evolution of continents and the processes that energize them. He received his PhD from the University of Washington, Seattle, and is the author of over seventy research articles and a textbook on geothermal energy. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
“The Carcass Chronicle,” by Robin Patten, published by The Georgia Review, in its Fall 2018 issue..
John Burroughs opens his essay “A Sharp Lookout” with the following: “One has only to sit down in the woods or the fields, or by the shore of the river or the lake, and nearly everything of interest will come round to him. . . .” There is no better proof of this wise saw than Robin Patten's essay, “The Carcass Chronicle.” The only difference is that she comes round to an elk's carcass that, over time, will prove to be a magnet drawing all kinds of wildlife into view. She learns—or intensifies what she has always intuited--that she herself is part of the large “community of life” we call nature. In her own words, “by listening with more than my ears, attuned in a way that left me balanced on the brink of understanding something inexplicable and timeless, yet close,” she sees the world anew. Her sentences mediate between self and other in a style lucid, deeply emotional, and highly poetical.
In general, “The Carcass Chronicle” focuses on how intimately intertwined are life and death in nature, an insight often misunderstood. Death is not the end of life for the cow elk but rather the locus of a transfer of energy from one creature to another. To quote Patten again, as she observes the carcass carefully over time in her neck of the woods, “In that little meadow nestled against the forest, a carcass whispered simultaneously of past living and death's closeness.” John Burroughs again, almost as if he were predicting Robin Patten taking a sharp lookout of her own: “Nature comes home to one most when he is at home. . . . One's own landscape comes in time to be a sort of outlying part of himself. . . .”
As different creatures come to feast upon the carcass--”a crumbling corpse where life was enriched”--she explores the interpenetration of human and natural worlds. She herself comes to “talk” with the most persistent visitors to the carcass: ravens. She imagines, in their “crawks,” that they are talking to her. Humorously, she even tries to “crawk” back. In sum, “The Carcass Chronicle” transcends the imitations of a nature essay, adding a philosophical dimension not always endemic to the form.
Robin Patten is a freelance writer, naturalist, and teacher. Her homeland is in the mountain country of south-central Montana. When not in Montana, if she’s not on a trek in some wildish place, Robin is usually found in the Scottish Highlands, another mountainous landscape that has become a second home.
A perpetual student, Robin’s wonder and curiosity about the natural world resulted in several degrees in both science and humanities, from a PhD in ecology to a Masters in environmental writing and literature. For her deeper, informal education she, like John Burroughs, owes much to her “excursions to Nature.”
Robin works part time in Scotland as a naturalist with Lindblad-National Geographic tours, and teaches for Montana State’s Extended University life-long learning program. She is a contributor to the UK Guardian’s Country Diary column and has published essays and articles in The Georgia Review, The Mindful Word, Montana Outdoors, Camas: The Nature of the West, as well as in scientific journals.
The Brilliant Deep Kate Messner with illustrations by Matthew Forsythe, published
by Chronicle Books
The Coral Kingdom Laura Knowles with illustrations by Jennie Webber, published by
Words & Pictures, an imprint of Quarto Publishing
Counting Birds Heidi E.Y. Stemple with illustrations by Clover Robin, published
By Seagrass, an imprint of Quarto Publishing
Natural History Collector Michael Sanchez, published by Quarry Books, an imprint of Quarto Publishing 
Salamander Sky Katy Farber with illustrations by Meg Sodano, published by
Green Writers Press
We Build Our Homes Laura Knowles with illustrations by Chris Madden, published by
Words & Pictures, an imprint of Quarto Publishing.
2018 AWARD WINNERS:
The Songs of Trees, by David George Haskell, published by Viking Books, 2017
The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature’s Connectors explores how trees and people are intimately connected, for better or worse, and how the trees adapt. The author travels the world’s forests and cities, repeatedly encountering a dozen chosen trees, whose individual stories weave the tight fabric of the book. Beginning with a towering ceibo in an Ecuadorian rain forest, "my anchor in this botanical confusion and delight," he moves on to a bird-thronged balsam fir in northwestern Ontario; a petrified redwood and a living Ponderosa pine in the Rocky Mountains, which speak to life past and present, and the future of fire, vulcanism, and climate; and two urban survivors—a persistent pear tree on Broadway in Manhattan, and a gnarly olive near the Damascus Gate in Jerusalem. With each of these old friends and his other selected trees, Haskell studies their ancient evolved traits and long panoramas of connection. All the while he listens to their sounds— their “songs”—which he weaves into his riveting stories.
In rich, often stunningly beautiful prose, Haskell uses his astounding powers of observation and reveals how trees, through their webs of fungi and communities of bacteria, the actions of animals and other plants, and their human intersections, are the center of a biological network that underpins all life, including our own. He examines our profound relationship with nature through a fresh lens, powerfully arguing against the ‘otherness’ of nature that denies our own wild being and furthers the idea that there can be no separation between what’s human and what’s nature—blurring that distinction. The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature’s Connectors pushes the genre of nature writing in a welcome new direction.
David Haskell’s work integrates scientific, literary, and contemplative studies of nature. His first book, The Forest Unseen, was finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction and received numerous honors including the National Academies’ Best Book Award. The book has been translated into ten languages. Haskell is a Guggenheim Fellow and a Professor at the University of the South in Sewanee, TN, where his classes have received national attention for combining action in the community with contemplative practice.
“The Keeper of the Ghost Bird,” by Jenn Dean, published by the Massachusetts Review, in its October 2017 issue.
“The Keepers of the Ghost Bird,” is a judicious blend of observation and research that transports. The fascinating historical center part of the essay is nested between a short introduction and a substantial second half that brings up to the present the tale of the “ghost bird,” the cahow, a petrel, one native to the Bermuda alone. Only recently on Nonsuch Island has the bird been saved from extinction, even though its future is still rather precarious. Jenn Dean intertwines human history and natural history. Her selection from historical documents makes it seem as if she were present in the past, describing what she alone can see. Dean's style is mesmerizing, from her use of inventive metaphors to what can only be called an “exciting” choice of verbs. She is sensitive to the rhythm of paragraphs, culminating in one case with a one-sentence paragraph that contains the whole history of the Bermuda in: “The only wilderness left in Bermuda is the sea.”
Denn then brings the reader to the present; her own immediate experience, the natural history of Nonsuch Island today, and the efforts by a few devoted persons to reinvigorate the island and make it habitable once again for the cahow. The essay reaches its climax when Dean cradles an adult cahow: “I was holding a pterodactyl in my arms—I was holding the dodo, the auk, and a thousand other birds, all the birds that had evolved and gone extinct before Bermuda was first discovered.” Then, in a coda, the essay opens up to consider the detrimental effects of our human activity on this planet, and how our tenancy here is linked inextricably to the cahow, the “ghost bird” of this essay's title.
Jenn Dean grew up in upstate New York and received a B.A. from S.U.N.Y. New Paltz. While living in Boston, she received an M.F.A. from the Bennington Writing Seminars in Literature and Nonfiction. Since moving to the Pacific Northwest ten years ago, was awarded a Millay Colony residency and has been a writer-in-residence at Centrum in Port Townsend, Washington. Her memoir, The House of My Sleepless Nights, is soon to be published, a portion of which was published in Salamander. Dean was a finalist for the Lamar York Prize in nonfiction writing and her essay The Keepers of the Ghost Bird, was a finalist in the New Millennium Writings Literary Awards. Dean lives and writes in the Snoqualmie Valley in Western Washington.
Amazon Adventure Sy Montgomery with photographs by Keith Ellenbogen, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 
Creekfinding: A True Story Jacqueline Briggs Martin with illustrations by Claudia McGehee,
published by the University of Minnesota Press
Karl, Get Out of the Garden! Carolus Linnaeus and the Naming of Everything Anita Sanchez with illustrations by Catherine Stock, published by Charlesbridge Publishing 
Over and Under the Pond Kate Messner with art by Christopher Silas Neal, published by Chronicle Books 
Robins! How They Grow Up Written and illustrated by Eileen Christlelow, published by
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Pattiann Rogers is awarded a special John Burroughs Medal for Lifetime Achievement
in Nature Poetry in recognition of the power and permanence of Rogers’ entire body of
work. Her poetry is among the most important and durable of any contemporary poet. It
reconciles humans and nature and celebrates their meetings. The award also
acknowledges the continuing significance of poetry in the public sphere.
Few major American poets have written such distinguished verse that is so dramatically
informed by natural history. Rogers's work lies clearly in the long tradition of John
Burroughs’ friend Walt Whitman, but takes the form deep into the modern idiom. It
remains accessible to readers who to love her imagery, stories, wit, and the richness of
animal-, plant-, and earth-driven words. Answering how the human heart and body lie
squarely within the rest of the living world drives Rogers’ genius.
Over her writing career of nearly four decades, Rogers has published fourteen books of
poetry and two books of prose, among the most acclaimed Firekeeper and Song of the
World Becoming. Her latest book is Quickening Fields, published in 2017 by Penguin
Books.
Pattiann Rogers was born, raised, and educated in Joplin, Missouri. After graduating
Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Missouri, Columbia, with a Bachelor of Arts
degree in English Literature, with a minor in Zoology, Rogers went on to earn a Master's
Degree in Creative Writing from the University of Houston. She now lives in Colorado.
Rogers is the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts grants, a Guggenheim
Fellowship, and a Literary Award in Poetry from the Lannan Foundation. Among her
many other awards, her poems have received five Pushcart Prize and two appearances
in Best American Poetry. Rogers has taught as a visiting writer at several universities
and has held a Rockefeller Foundation residency.
Books by Pattiann Rogers
Poetry
The Expectations of Light (Princeton University Press, 1981)
The Tattooed Lady in the Garden (Wesleyan University Press, 1986)
Legendary Performance (Ion Books, 1987)
Splitting and Binding (Wesleyan University Press, 1989)
Geoentric (Gibbs Smith Publisher, A Peregrine Smith Book, 1993)
Firekeeper: New and Selected Poems (Milkweed Editions, 1994)
Eating Bread and Honey (Milkweed Editions, 1997)
A Covenant of Seasons (in collaboration with Joellyn Duesberry, Hudson Hills Press,
1998)
Song of the World Becoming: New and Collected Poems, 1981 - 2001 (Milkweed
Editions, 2001)
Generations (The Penguin Group, 2004)
Wayfare (The Penguin Group, 2008)
Firekeeper, Selected Poems, Revised and Expanded Edition (Milkweed Editions, 2010)
Holy Heathen Rhapsody The Penguin Group, 2013)
Quickening Fields (Penguin/Random House, 2017)
Prose
The Dream of the Marsh Wren: Writing as Reciprocal Creation (Milkweed Editions,
1999)
The Grand Array (Trinity University Press, 2010)
Poetry, Limited Editions
Lies and Devotions, 160 copies (Tangram Press, 1994)
Animals and People, The Human Heart in Conflict with Itself, 100 copies, etchings by
Margot Voorhies Thompson (Knight Library Press, University of Oregon, 1997)
Summer's Company, 151 copies, (Brooding Heron Press, 2009)
2017 AWARD WINNERS:
Martin Marten, by Brian Doyle (published by Macmillan Publishers in 2015)
Martin Marten, only the second work of fiction to be awarded the Medal in its 90-year history, is an engaging novel about the relationship between a boy and a pine marten, the home they share in the forest near Mt. Hood, Oregon, and the other lives going on around them, human and other. Doyle is a keen observer of the natural world, including humans. With a lifelong fascination in the family Mustelidae, he has always taken a keen interest in pine martens and their relatives. For Martin Marten, he closely observed their ways and habitats in the Oregon Cascades, and how they bump up against their two-legged neighbors where the wilderness meets the edge of human civilization. Doyle’s life as a writer has been a long field trip in the natural history of his own and other species. When he represents the lives of these animals, he does so with the accuracy of a zoologist blended with the imagination of the poet. The judges felt how he combined an acute sense of human behavior with a wild natural setting and the life of a native denizen of the forest showed uncommon breadth, depth, and originality of insight.
Brian Doyle is the editor of Portland Magazine and is well known to contemporary readers of environmental literature. His essays have appeared in Orion, The Atlantic Monthly, American Scholar, The New York Times, and other periodicals around the world, and have been reprinted in the annual anthologies Best American Essays, Best American Science and Nature Writing, and Best American Spiritual Writing. He has also edited several anthologies. His many books include the critically acclaimed Mink River, The Plover, and Children and other Wild Animals. His awards include the John Burroughs Nature Essay Award, 2000, Oregon Book Award, three Pushcart Prizes, and the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, 2008. He lives in outside Portland, Oregon, with his wife Mary.
John Burroughs Medal Finalists: Nature Books of Uncommon Merit
- Coyote Settles the South, John Lane, The University of Georgia Press, 2016
- The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature, J. Drew Lanham, Milkweed Editions. 2016
- Coast Range: a Collection from the Pacific Edge, Nick Neely, Counterpoint Press, 2016
- Mythical River: Chasing the Mirage of the New Water in the American Southwest, Melissa L. Sevigny, University of Iowa Press, 2016
The Slow and Tender Death of Cockroaches, by Sean Smith, published by Georgia Review, in its Fall 2016 issue.
Although cockroaches sound like an improbable subject for a nature essay, it recognizes that insects are as much a part of nature as mammals, birds, fish, and amphibians (one of the most endangered species of all). As Sean Smith writes at the outset, "Roaches are everyone's favorite enemy." Though it may begin with cockroaches, which survived three major extinctions, his enquiring mind ranges widely from the negative effects homo sapiens is having on the biodiversity of our planet, the dangers climate change holds for us and all living beings, a possible nuclear winter, to one of his favorite haunts, Table Mountain above CapeTown, South Africa. His writing is scientifically and historically accurate as well as witty in its word choices and phraseology. "The Slow and Tender Death of Cockroaches" is thus surprising, intellectually venturesome, and remarkably comprehensive.
Sean P. Smith grew up in Montana and has lived and taught in the Middle East and South Africa. He currently resides in Hong Kong.
Circle written and illustrated by Jeannie Baker and published by Candlewick Press. 
Crow Smarts Pamela S. Turner with photographs by Andy Comins and illustrated by Guido de Filippo, and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 
Finding Wild by Megan Wagner Lloyd and illustrated by Abigail Halpin and published by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Penguin Random House. 
The Great White Shark Scientists by Sy Montgomery and photographs by Keith Ellenbogen and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 
¡Olinguito, de la A a la Z! written and illustrated by Lulu Delacre and published by Lee 
One North Star by Phyllis Root and illustrated by Beckie Prange and Betsy Bowen, and published by University of Minnesota Press. 
Plants Can’t Sit Still by Rebecca Hirsch and illustrated by Mia Posada, and published by Millbrook Press, a division of Lerner publishing Group.
2016 AWARD WINNERS:
Diary of a Citizen Scientist: Chasing Tiger Beetles and Other New Ways of Engaging the World, by Sharman Apt Russell (published by Oregon State University Press)
Diary of a Citizen Scientist is a timely exploration of the phenomenon of volunteer citizen scientists, told through the lens of nature writer Sharman Apt Russell’s yearlong study of a little-known species, the Western red-bellied tiger beetle. Russell discovered new facts of natural history, without being a scientist, but by looking very closely. She understands that 'citizen science' is to the 21st century what ’naturalist’ was to Burroughs’ 19th century. Her book has the power to genuinely advocate for the modern everywoman and everyman whose embrace of science and nature through citizen science will surely make our world a better place. She succeeded in transforming facts into a luminous portrayal of a way of thinking about and living within the natural world. And, her role extended beyond acting as an informed observer into becoming a passionate participant—not only by undertaking the beetle investigation, but by engaging in the process of science itself, and beyond that, trying to understand and instill or inspire that interest in others.The 2016 John Burroughs Nature Essay Award goes to Bernd Heinrich for Chickadees in Winter, published by Natural History magazine in its March 2015 issue. Combining a naturalist’s habit of patient observation with his scientific bent for experiment, acclaimed nature writer Bernd Heinrich uncovers a piece of behavioral intelligence that goes a long way toward explaining how a small, common bird makes it through the coldest season. The creature observed is far from exotic—it is the black-capped chickadee that’s found year-round in the northern half of the United States and in Canada.
Heinrich once again illustrates that the habits of even the most familiar of creatures are complex and fascinating, and yet to be explored. His essay epitomizes the intelligence, enthusiasm, and joyous experimenting spirit of natural history at its best. A small and not-very-charismatic bird seizes his imagination and just won't let go of him until he comes to see some provisional truths about it that he hadn't seen before.
The Secret Bay, by Kimberly Ridley and illustrated by Rebekah Raye. A Tilbury House Nature Book, published by Tilbury House Publishers. 
Welcome to New Zealand: A Nature Journal, written and illustrated by Sandra Morris and published by Candlewick Press. 
Honorable Mention work of fiction that embodies the qualities of Riverby Books:
Hungry Coyote by Cheryl Blackford and illustrated by Laurie Caple. Published by the Minnesota Historical Society Press.
2015 AWARD WINNERS:
Dominion of Bears: Living with Wildlife in Alaska, by Sherry Simpson (published by the University Press of Kansas, 2013): Dominion of Bears is a comprehensive book about a problem that seems exotic, if you do not happen to live in Alaska: the impingement of bears and people upon each other's territory. Simpson pursues her subjects to the far corners of a vast state, from the North Slope to the Panhandle, and her research is no less wide-ranging. She is fair minded, listens to all sides — people who love bears, people who imagine that they love bears, and people who have real or imaginary reasons for hating them. By the end of the book, and regardless of your own biases, you are obliged to acknowledge that the question is unexpectedly complicated, as are bears themselves, both specifically and individually. Simpson was lauded by the selection committee as one of the strongest recent winners for her excellence in the tradition of natural history writing.
Sherry Simpson, considered one of Alaska's foremost essayists, is the author of two previous books, The Way Winter Comes: Alaska Stories, winner of the 1997 Chinook Literary Prize, and The Accidental Explorer: Wayfinding in Alaska. She is an associate professor in the Creative Writing and Literary Arts Department of the University of Alaska Anchorage.
The Book of Agate by Nick Neely (published by Ninth Letter in its Fall/Winter 2014-15 issue): In "The Book of Agate Nick Neely arrays his brief prose stanzas like agates from a tumbler, their banded colors glowing, each piece unique and complementary, the spaces between them alive with associations. The Book of Agate is unconventional in form yet belongs entirely to the nature essay tradition, the writer turning in mind his personal experience while casting upon it the various lights of science, history, philosophy, and literature. Neely, who declares himself a collector of stones and of places, gives evidence in this essay that he is also a quietly adroit collector of readers.
"We at Ninth Letter were delighted to learn that Nicholas Neely's essay "The Book of Agate" was chosen for this year's John Burroughs Nature Essay Award. It was an honor to publish this piece, which is lyrical, evocative, and emotionally resonant. Mr. Neely's writing certainly deserves high praise, and we are grateful that the Essay Committee also recognizes the merits of "The Book of Agate." Ninth Letter
Neelys essays are published, or are forthcoming, in The Kenyon Review, The Threepenny Review, The Southern Review, The Missouri Review, Ecotone, River Teeth, and High Country News. "The Book of Agate" is from a recently-completed collection, "Coast Range," on natural history in Northern California and Southern Oregon. Neely is currently a writer-in-residence at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology on the Oregon coast.
Read the essay at Ninth Letter.
Feathers: Not Just for Flying, Melissa Stewart, author, and Sarah S. Brannen, illustrator, Charlesbridge, 2014 
Behold the Beautiful Dung Beetle, Cheryl Bardoe, author, and Alan Marks, illustrator, Charlesbridge, 2014 
Neighborhood Sharks: Hunting with the Great Whites of California's Farallon Islands, Katherine Roy, author, David Macaulay Studio, an imprint of Roaring Brook Press, 2014 
Plant a Pocket of Prairie, by Phyllis Root, author, and Betsy Bowen, illustrator, University of Minnesota Press, 2014 
Water Rolls, Water Rises, by Pat Mora, author and Meilo So, illustrator, Children's Book Press, an imprint of Lee & Low, 2014 
Winter Bees & Other Poems of the Cold, by Joyce Sidman & Rick Allen, authors, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014
2014 AWARD WINNERS:
Sightlines by Kathleen Jamie (published by The Experiment, New York, 2013):Sightlines offers a landmark work about the natural world and our relationship to it. Jamie explores her native Scottish surroundings, intermingling personal history with observations of the landscape. Her travels lead her to study whale bones in Norwegian museums, explore remote Scottish islands, and watch icebergs in the Arctic. Sightlines invites us to take a moment to pause and reconsider what nature gives us.
Jamie is the author of four books of poetry and three nonfiction titles, including Sightlines. In 2012 she won the Costa Book Award for Poetry and is one of the United Kingdom's foremost poets. Jamie is the Chair of Poetry at the University of Stirling, Scotland, and lives with her family in Fife, Scotland.
Council of the Pecans by Robin Wall Kimmerer (published by Orion Magazine in its September/October 2013 issue): In "Council of the Pecans" Kimmerer writes with a naturalist's knowledge, a poet's imagination, and the narrative grace of a fine storyteller. She effortlessly weaves the social history of the Potawatomi Native Americans with detailed biological information about pecans, especially their abundance during mast fruiting, thereby giving substance to the value of sacred land. Not only are the pecan trees a model for human behavior, but they are a symbol for the resilience of Kimmerer's Potawatomi peoples. She writes with a sensitive descriptive hand, knowing the effectiveness of varying sentence rhythms along with an awareness of concrete verbs in telling her informative and moving story of the metaphorically expressive "Council of the Pecans."
"Orion is thrilled that Robin Wall Kimmerer's essay 'Council of the Pecans' has won the John Burroughs Nature Essay Award. The gracefulness of Robin's prose, combined with her unique ability to bring multiple ways of knowing to bear on her subject matter, made this a standout piece for Orion. We are so proud to see it honored in this way." Orion Magazine
Kimmerer is also the author of a fabulous new book: Braiding Sweetgrass
Kimmerer is a mother, scientist, decorated professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. Her first book, Gathering Moss, was awarded the John Burroughs Medal for distinguished nature writing in 2005. Her writings have appeared in Orion, Whole Terrain, and numerous scientific journals. She lives in Fabius, New York, where she is a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology, and the founder and director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment.
Read the essay published in Orion.
The Animal Book, Steve Jenkins, author, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, (2013). 
The Mystery of Darwin's Frog, Marty Crump, author, illustrations, by Steve Jenkins and Edel Rodriquez, Boyds Mills Press, (2013). 
Parrots Over Puerto Rico, Susan Roth and Cindy Trumbore, authors, Susan L. Roth, collages, Lee & Low Books, Inc., (2013). 
The Secret Pool, Kimberly Ridley, author, and Rebekah Raye, illustrator, Tilbury House Nature Book, (2013). 
Honorable Mention: Ellie's Log: Exploring the Forest Where the Great Tree Fell, Judith L. Li, author, M.L. Herring, illustrator, Oregon University Press, (2013).
2013 AWARD WINNERS:
Feathers by Thor Hanson (published by Basic Books): To read this book is to immerse yourself in the cozy delights of a down comforter, while stimulating your intellect with pure fascination. The stories in Feathers are told with all the precision and beauty of a finely cut quill pen. As one juror described it, "this book is great natural history with intense focus and telescopic detail. It soars through an engaging blend of history, archaeology, animal behavior, art, physics, and conservation. Uplifting, swift, learned, and fun," it takes you from the wildest of natural habitats to Las Vegas dance halls, and from museum vaults to houses of haute couture. Hanson is lauded by the selection committee as one of our strongest winners for his excellence in the tradition of natural history writing.
Thor Hanson is an independent conservation biologist and author who lives with his family in the San Juan Islands of Washington, and has studied Central American trees and songbirds, nest predation in Tanzania, and the grisly feeding habits of African vultures. He is the author of The Impenetrable Forest: My Gorilla Years in Uganda.
The Larch by Rick Bass: Where John Burroughs had Riverby and Slabsides as his backyard to see the secrets that lurk on all sides in nature, Rick Bass has the Yaak Valley in Northwestern Montana, as his. For years he has been tramping its woods and watching its wildlife. As this year's nature essay contest winner, The Larch, attests, looking closely at something others might disregard, [like] the larch tree itself, Rick Bass sees the novel in the familiar, exploring all aspects of this strange deciduous conifer. His knowledge of the larch is scientific, wide-ranging, and his prose is poetic in its invocation of the nobility of this "humble" subject, as he puts it. The Larch fits right in the tradition of a John Burroughs essay as it discovers "something everlastingly present in what appeared to be evanescent." The essay highlights the tree itself, its place in the Yaak Valley ecosystem, and the beauty of its gold as it changes color in Autumn. Read the essay published in Orion.
A Leaf Can Be, Laura Purdie Salas, author, and Violeta Dabija, illustrator, Lerner Publishing Group/Millbrook Press, (2012).
Moonbird, Phillip Hoose, author, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt/FSG, (2012).
Rachael Carson and Her Book That Changed the World, Laurie Lawlor, author, and Laura Beingessner, Illustrator, Holiday House, (2012).
Ocean Sunlight: How Tiny Plants Feed The Seas, Molly Bang and Penny Chisholm, authors, Molly Bang, illustrator, Scholastic Inc./The Blue Sky Press (2012).
W
ild Horse Scientists, Kay Frydenborg, author, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, (2012).
PREVIOUS AWARD WINNERS:
John Burroughs Medal
The John Burroughs Association annually recognizes a most distinguished book of natural history and awards the author the John Burroughs Medal.
The following lists the John Burroughs Medal winners since 1926. Note that the Medal was not awarded in 1931, 1935, 1937, 1944, 1947, 1951, 1959, 1975, and 1980.
2024: Marina Richie, Halcyon Journey: A Search for the Belted Kingfisher, Oregon State University Press, 2022
2023: Kelby Ouchley, Bayou D’Arbonne Swamp: A Naturalist’s Memoir of Place, Louisianna State University Press, 2022
2022: Cal Flyn, Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-Human Landscape, Viking Books, imprint of Penguin Random House, 2021
2021: William Bryant Logan, Sprout Lands: Tending the Endless Gift of Trees, W. W. Norton & Company, 2020
2020: Marilyn Sigman, Entangled: People and Ecological Change in Alaska’s Kachemak Bay, University of Alaska Press, 2018
2019: William Glassley, A Wilder Time: Notes from a Geologist at the Edge of the Greenland Ice, Bellevue Literary Press, 2018
2018: David Haskell, The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature’s Great Connectors, Viking Books, imprint of Penguin Random House, 2017
2017: Brian Doyle, Marten Martin, New York: St. Martin’s Press, imprint of MacMillan, 2015
2016: Sharman Apt Russell, Diary of a Citizen Scientist: Chasing Tiger Beetles and Other New Ways of Engaging the World, Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2014
2015: Sherry Simpson, Dominion of Bears: Living with Wildlife in Alaska, Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2013
2014: Kathleen Jamie, Sightlines, New York: The Experiment, 2013.
2013: Thor Hanson, Feathers, New York: Basic Books, 2011
2012: Haogland, Edward (Ted), Sex and the River Styx, Chelsea Green, 2011
2011: Bailey, Elisabeth Tova, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, Algonquin Books, 2010
2010: Welland, Michael, Sand, University of California Press, 2009
2009: Burroughs, Franklin, Confluence: Merrymeeting Bay, Tilbury House, 2006
2008: Whitty, Julia, The Fragile Edge: Diving and Other Adventures in the South Pacific, Houghton Mifflin Company, 2007
2007: Meloy, Ellen. Eating Stone Pantheon Books, 2005
2006: Kroodsma, Donald. The Singing Life of Birds Houghton Mifflin, 2005.
2005: Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses Oregon State University Press, 2003.
2004: Levin, Ted. Liquid Land: A Journey Through The Florida Everglades The University of Georgia Press, 2003.
2003: Safina, Carl. Eye Of The Albatross: Visions of Hope and Survival Henry Holt and Company, 2002.
2002: Lamberton, Ken. Wilderness and Razor Wire. Mercury House, 2000.
2001: Carroll, David M. Swampwalker's Journal. Houghton Mifflin, 1999.
2000: Heindrich, Bernd. Mind Of the Raven. New York : HarperCollins, 1999.
1999: DeBlieu, Jan. Wind: How the Flow of Air Has Shaped Life, Myth, and the Land. Boston : Houghton Mifflin, 1998.*
1998: Alcock, John. In a Desert Garden. New York : W.W. Norton, 1997.
1997: Quammen, David. The Song Of The Dodo. New York : Scribner, 1996.*
1996: Green, Bill. Water, Ice and Stone. New York : Harmony Books, 1995.*
1995: Packer, Craig. Into Africa. Chicago : University of Chicago Press,1994.*
1994: Campbell, David G. The Crystal Desert: Summers in Antarctica. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992.*
1993: Dethier, Vincent G. Crickets and Katydids, Concerts and Solos. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992.*
1992: Norris, Kenneth S. Dolphin Days. New York : W.W. Norton, 1991.*
1991: Nelson, Richard. The Island Within. San Francisco : North Point Press,1989.*
1990: McPhee, John. The Control of Nature. New York : Farrar Straus Giroux,1989.
1989: Kilham, Lawrence. On Watching Birds. Chelsea, Vt. : Chelsea Green, 1988.*
1988: Horton, Tom. Bay Country. Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.*
1987: Pyle, Robert Michael. Wintergreen. New York : Scribner's, 1986.*
1986: Nabhan, Gary Paul. Gathering in the Desert. Tucson : University of Arizona Press, 1985.
1985: Owens, Mark and Delia. Cry of the Kalahari. Boston : Houghton Mifflin, 1984.*
1984: Wallace, David Rains. The Klamath Knot. San Francisco : Sierra Club Books, 1983.*
1983: Skutch, Alexander F. A Naturalist on a Tropical Farm. Berkeley : University of California Press, 1980.*
1982: Matthiessen, Peter. Sand Rivers. New York : Viking Press, 1981.*
1981: Durant, Mary, and Harwood, Michael. On the Road with John James Audubon.New York : Dodd, Mead, 1980.*
1979: Lopez, Barry Holstun. Of Wolves and Men. New York : Scribner's, 1978.*
1978: Kirk, Ruth. Desert: The American Southwest. Boston : Houghton Mifflin, 1973.*
1977: Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac. Madison, Wis. : Tamarack Press, 1977.*
1976: Zwinger, Ann Haymond. Run, River, Run. New York : Harper Row, 1975.*
1974: Olson, Sigurd F. Wilderness Days. New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 1972.
1973: Barlow, Elizabeth. The Forests and Wetlands of New York City. Boston : Little, Brown, 1971.*
1972: Arbib, Robert S. The Lord's Woods. New York : Norton, 1971.
1971: Terres, John K. From Laurel Hill to Siler's Bog. New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 1969.*
1970: Scheffer, Victor B. The Year of the Whale. New York : Scribner's, 1969.*
1969: Lawrence, Louise de Kiriline. The Lovely and the Wild. New York : McGraw-Hill, 1968.*
1968: Borland, Hal G. Hill Country Harvest. Philadelphia : Lippincott, 1967.
1967: Ogburn, Jr., Charlton. The Winter Beach. Morrow.
1966: Darling, Louis. The Gull's Way. Morrow.
1965: Brooks, Paul. Roadless Area. New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 1964.
1964: Hay, John. The Great Beach. Garden City : Doubleday, 1963.
1963: Murie, Adolph. A Naturalist in Alaska. New York : Devin-Adair, 1961.*
1962: Sutton, George Miksch. Iceland Summer. Norman : University of Oklahoma Press.*
1961: Eiseley, Loren C. The Firmament of Time. New York : Atheneum, 1960.*
1960: Kieran, John. A Natural History of New York City. Boston : Houghton-Mifflin, 1959.*
1958: Allen, Robert Porter. On the Trail of the Vanishing Birds. New York: McGraw Hill, 1957.
1957: Carr, Archie Fairly. The Windward Road. New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 1956.*
1956: Murchie, Guy. Song of the Sky. Houghton Mifflin.
1955:Grange, Wallace B. Those of the Forest. New York : Devin-Adair, 1953.*
1954: Krutch, Joseph Wood. The Desert Year. New York : Bobbs, 1952.
1953: Klingel, Gilbert. The Bay. New York : Dodd, Mead, 1951.*
1952: Carson, Rachel L. The Sea Around Us. New York : Oxford University Press, 1951.*
1950: Peterson, Roger Tory. Birds Over America. New York : Dodd, Mead, 1948.*
1949: Cruickshank, Helen. Flight into Sunshine. New York : Macmillan, 1948.*
1948: Stanwell-Fletcher, Theodora. Driftwood Valley. Boston : Little, Brown, 1946.*
1946: Jaques, Mr. and Mrs. Frances Lee. Snowshoe Country. Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1944.
1945: Platt, Rutherford. This Green World. New York : Dodd, Mead, 1944.*
1943: Teale, Edwin Way. Near Horizons. New York : Dodd, Mead, 1942.*
1942: Armstrong, Edward A. Birds of the Grey Wind. London ; New York : Oxford University Press, 1940.*
1941: Halle, Jr., Louis J. Birds against Men. New York : Viking Press, 1938.*
1940: Bent, Arthur Cleveland. Life Histories of North American Birds (18-titleseries). U.S. G.P.O.
1939: Pearson, T. Gilbert. Adventures in Bird Protection. New York : Appleton-Century,1937.*
1938: Murphy, Robert Cushman. Oceanic Birds of South America. New York: American Museum of Natural History, 1936.*
1936: Gorst, Charles Crawford. Recordings of Bird Calls. Publisher NA.
1934: Christman, W. W. Wild Pasture Pine. Albany : The Argus Co., 1933.
1933: Medsger, Oliver P. Nature Rambles. New York : Wayne, 1931-1932.
1932: Dellenbaugh, Frederick S. A Canyon Voyage. New York : Putnam, 1908.
1930: Rutledge, Archibald. Peace in the Heart. Garden City : Doubleday, 1930.
1929: Chapman, Frank M. Handbook of North American Birds. New York : Appleton, 1929.*
1928: McCarthy, John Russell. Nature Poems. Publisher NA.
1927: Seton, Ernest Thompson. Lives of Game Animals. Scribner's.*
1926. Beebe, William. Pheasants of the World. New York Zoological Society.
John Burroughs Nature Essay Award
Each year since 1993, the John Burroughs Association has selected an outstanding published natural history essay, with selection based on the work's content and literary value. An award of recognition is presented to the author of the selected essay at the Association's annual luncheon and awards ceremony held every April at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
The following list presents the essay award winners to date.
• 2024, Gary Noel Ross. “A Prairie Royal.” Natural History Magazine, February 2023.
• 2023 Christina Rivera Cogswell. “The 17th Day.” Terrain.org, January 1, 2022.
•2022 Carolyn Kuebler. “Wildflower Season.” The Massachusetts Review, Fall 2021.
• 2021 Kate Olson. “Dis-Ease: Documenting change and nurturing life in an uncertain world.” Earth Island Journal, Spring 2020.
• 2020 William Bryant Logan. “The Things Trees Know: A look inside their secret lives.” Orion, Winter 2018.
• 2019 Robin Patten. The Carcass Chronicle.” The Georgia Review, Fall 2018.
• 2018 Jenn Dean. “The Keeper of the Ghost Bird…” The Massachusetts Review, October 2017.
• 2017 Sean P. Smith. “The Slow and Tender Death of Cockroaches.” The Georgia Review, Fall 2016
• 2016 Bernd Heinrich. “Chickadees in Winter.” Natural History Magazine, March 2015.
• 2015 Nick Neely. “The Book of Agate.” Ninth Letter, Fall/Winter 2014/15.
• 2014 Robin Wall Kimmerer. “Council of the Pecan.” Orion, September/October 2013.
• 2013 Rick Bass. "The Larch, a Love Story.” Orion, September/October 2012.
• 2012, Brian Doyle, "The Creature Beyond the Mountains", Orion, (September/October 2011)
• 2011, Quinn, Jill Sisson , "Sign Here If You Exist", Ecotone, (Fall 2010)
• 2010, Sanders, Scott Russell, "Mind in the Forest", Orion, (November/December 2009)
• 2009, Smith, Mark A., "Animalcules and Other Little Subjects", Isotope (Fall/Winter 2008)
• 2008, Cokinos, Christopher, "The Consolations of Extinction", Orion (May/June 2007)
• 2007, Gessner, David, "Learning to Surf", Orion (March/April 2006)
• 2006, Lowry, Judith, "Birdsong Ripens Berries, Wind Brings the Seeds", Orion (May/June 2005)
• 2005. Kanze, Edward, "In Search of Something Lost", Adirondack Life (May/June, 2004)
• 2004. House, Freeman, "Afterlife", Orion (May/June, 2003)
• 2003. Lockwood, Jeff, "Voices from the Past", Orion -Twentieth Anniversary Issue (Summer, 2002)
• 2002. Smuts, Barbara, "Naturalist at Large: Coming Home", Natural History (October, 2001)
• 2001. Conniff, Richard, "So Tiny, so sweet...so Mean", Smithsonian Magazine (September, 2000)
• 2000. Scott Russell Sanders, "Through the Eyes of a Hawk", Audubon (July-Aug. 1999)
• 1999. Kenneth Brower, "Let's Root for the Coot", Smithsonian (December 1998)
• 1998. Michael Pollan, "Building a Room of My Own", New York Times Magazine (February 9, 1997)
• 1997. Geerat Vermeij, "The Touch of a Shell", Discover (August, 1996)
• 1996. Gary Noel Ross, "Butterfly Wrangling in Louisiana", Natural History Magazine (May, 1995)
• 1995. John Daniel, "Toward Wild Heartlands", Audubon Magazine (Sept. 10, 1994)
• 1994. John Mitchell, "Greens", Sanctuary (Sept.-Oct., 1993)
Riverby Award
Download the sortable Excel version of the Riverby Awardees for excellence in natural history books for young readers here.