“An essay “not bound to its origins can become something that matters less for the situation it represents and more for what it—tough, resilient, lenslike—does, which is to rearrange the past and make possible a larger question, something perhaps about complicity, maybe forgiveness.”
Biography
Barbara Hurd teaches in the MFA in Writing Program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Books
The Epilogues (2021)
Listening to the Savage / River Notes and Half-Heard Melodies (2016)
Tidal Rhythms: Change and Resilience at the Edge of the Sea (with photographer Stephen Strom, 2016)
Stepping into the Same River Twice (with artist Patricia Hilton) 2013
Walking the Wrack Line: On Tidal Shifts and What Remains (2008)
Entering the Stone: On Caves and Feeling Through the Dark, a Library Journal Best Natural History Book of the Year (2003)
The Singer's Temple (2003)
Stirring the Mud: On Swamps, Bogs, and Human Imagination, a Los Angeles Times Best Book of 2001 (2001)
Objects in this Mirror (1994)
ESSAYS
Her essays have appeared in numerous journals including
Best American Essays
The Yale Review
The Georgia Review
Brevity
Lake Effect
Terrain.org
Ecotone
Plant-Human Quarterly
Orion
Audubon
and others
Awards & Fellowships
2015 Guggenheim Fellowship
NEA Fellowship for Creative Nonfiction
Sierra Club’s National Nature Writing Award
Three Pushcart Prizes
Five Maryland State Arts Council Awards
Selected Interviews
“I’ll not attempt to make much of a dead clam’s ascendancy, except to offer it as further evidence that the world is full of both beauty and breakage. If there’s an illusionless behest on the beach today, it’s this: how to live well, here, among the delicacies and ruins, the necessary insufficiencies of mystery and loss.”