Elizabeth Kolbert

A longtime staff writer for The New Yorker and formerly a reporter and columnist for The New York Times, Elizabeth Kolbert has largely focused her writings during the last decade on the issue of climate change. “The Climate of Man” (2005), her three-part series for The New Yorker on the hotly debated and often confusing topic of global warming, won a National Magazine Award, the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s magazine writing award, and a National Academies’ communications award. She then expanded the series, publishing Field Notes from a Catastrophe the following year; it received the Louis J. Battan Author’s Award from the American Meteorological Society and was named one of the one hundred notable books of the year by The New York Times.

Continuing in this vein, she has contributed in recent years more than a score of articles on climate and conservation topics to The New Yorker and National Geographic, and her work has been included in Climate Change: Picturing the Science (Norton, 2009), edited by Gavin Schmidt and Joshua Wolf, The Best American Science Writing 2007, and The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2010. She edited The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2009 and coedited The Ends of the Earth: An Anthology of the Finest Writing on the Arctic and the Antarctic (Bloomsbury, 2007). In November 2010, she received a Heinz Award for her outstanding body of work in environmental journalism.

During her Guggenheim Fellowship term, she will be completing a book-length study of extinction and the history of life.