David Gessner

Teaching and Editing

He returned to Harvard as a Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Environmental Writing in Fall 2003. In 2004 he began teaching at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where he is professor. He is the Editor in Chief of Ecotone the environmental journal he founded in 2004, which has published the work of writers as diverse as Wendell Berry, Denis Johnson, Gerald Stern, Sherman Alexie, and Marvin Bell. Recent work from the journal has been chosen for many anthologies, including the Pushcart Prize and Best American Short Stories edited by Salman Rushdie, as well as Best American Poetry and Best American Essays.

Recent Books and Awards

Gessner is the author of nine books of nonfiction, including, most recently, All the Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner and the American West; The Tarball Chronicles; and My Green Manifesto. The Tarball Chronicles won the 2012 Reed Award for Best Book on the Southern Environment and the Association for Study of Literature and the Environment’s award for best book of creative writing in 2011 and 2012.

Magazine and Journal Writing

His essays have appeared in many magazines and journals including The New York Times Magazine, Outside, The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2008, Onearth, The Georgia Review, The American Scholar, Orion, The Boston Sunday Globe Magazine, The Harvard Review, and the 2006 Pushcart Prize Anthology, for which the essay "Benediction" was selected. In April 2007, Gessner won the John Burroughs award for Best Natural History Essay of the year. In 2008, his essay, "The Dreamer Did Not Exist," appeared in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2008, edited by Dave Eggers, and in September of that year his essay on teaching and writing, "Those Who Write, Teach," appeared in the Sunday New York Times Magazine.

Online Work and Blog

Gessner is the co-creator of Bill and Dave's Cocktail Hour, a website he blogs for along with the writer Bill Roorbach. In October 2013, he appeared on MSNBC’s The Cycle to offer his take on the anniversary of Hurricane Sandy. His video, "Skiing the Beach," has now been watched by almost 16,000 YouTube viewers.

Literary works

In 1997, Gessner published A Wild, Rank Place, a short memoir about spending a year on Cape Cod and tending to his father while he died of cancer. The book subverted the typical Thoreauvian year-in-the-woods theme with its dark themes and blunt language. This was followed by Under the Devil’s Thumb, a collection of essays about an Easterner’s years spent in the West, years made more vital and radiant by the author’s own recovery from testicular cancer.

Since 2001, Gessner has published seven more books that combine memoir with humor and observations of the natural world, beginning with Return of the Osprey, in 2001. The Boston Globe and Book of the Month Club both chose Osprey as one of the top ten nonfiction books of 2001, the Globe calling it a "classic of American Nature Writing." In 2003, Gessner published Sick of Nature. Sick of Nature has been much-anthologized and taught at MIT and Harvard University and many other colleges. Of Sick of Nature, renowned eco-critic Michael Branch wrote, "Gessner has positioned himself as a sort of Woody Allen of environmental writers" and "like Emerson, who observed that the dead forms of institutional practice must be revivified through radical acts of intellectual, aesthetic and moral imagination, Gessner rails against the narrowness of environmental literature to open the field to new (if less earnest) approaches."

This was followed by The Prophet of Dry Hill, which described a series of encounters with the great nature writer John Hay. In Soaring with Fidel, released in April 2007, Gessner continued to push the nature genre, following the entire 7,000 mile migration of ospreys from New England to Cuba and Venezuela.