Jennifer Ackerman

Award-winning science writer and speaker Jennifer Ackerman has been writing about nature and science for more than three decades. She is the author of seven books, including the New York Times bestsellers, The Genius of Birds (Penguin Press, 2016) and What an Owl Knows: The New Science of the World’s Most Enigmatic Birds (Penguin Press, June 2023), which was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2023. Jennifer’s previous books include The Bird Way (2020), which won the 2021 Whitley Book Award and was a finalist for the 2021 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. It was named a Nature Book of the Year by the London Sunday Times. The Genius of Birds was a finalist for the 2017 National Academies Communication Book Award and was named one of the ten best nonfiction books of 2016 by the Wall Street Journal. It has been published in 28 languages. Jennifer is the recipient of a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts, the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College (now the Radcliffe Institute), Brown College at the University of Virginia, and the Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service at Tufts University.