J. Drew Lanham is author of The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature, which received the Southern Environmental Law Center’s Reed Award and the Southern Book Prize, and was a finalist for the John Burroughs Medal. His most recent book is Sparrow Envy: Field Guide to Birds and Lesser Beasts. He is a birder, naturalist, and hunter-conservationist who has published essays and poetry in publications including Orion, Audubon, Flycatcher, and Wilderness, and in several anthologies, including The Colors of
Nature, State of the Heart, Bartram’s Living Legacy, and Carolina Writers at Home. A 2022 MacArthur Fellow, alumni distinguished professor of wildlife ecology, and master teacher at Clemson University, he and his family live in upstate South Carolina, a soaring hawk’s downhill glide from the southern Appalachian escarpment that the Cherokee once called the Blue Wall.
