BOYCE UPHOLT

Boyce Upholt is a “nature critic” whose writing probes the relationship between humans and the rest of the natural world, especially in the U.S. South.

Boyce grew up in the Connecticut suburbs and holds a bachelor’s degree from Haverford College and an MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. He moved to the Mississippi Delta in 2009, where he discovered an unexpected wilderness amid an agricultural empire: the Mississippi River, which for hundreds of miles offers a corridor of islands and sandbars and wetland forests, with no settlement or development.

An obsession with how this wild place came to persist, despite so much change and engineering, inspired a wider interest in the strange nature of “nature” itself—this thing that we call separate but are really a part of. Boyce’s work ranges from straightforward journalism and science writing to travel writing that invites readers to better connect with the “more-than-human” world.

His work has been published in the Atlantic, National Geographic, the Oxford American, and Virginia Quarterly Review, among other publications, and was awarded the 2019 James Beard Award for investigative journalism. His stories have been noted in the Best American Science & Nature and Best American Nonrequired Reading series. Boyce lives in New Orleans.

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