Barbara Hurd is an author, essayist, and teacher in the M.F.A. writing program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her essays have appeared in Audubon, Best American Essays, The Georgia Review, Orion, and The Yale Review, among many others, and her books include Listening to the Savage/River Notes and Half-Heard Melodies (Georgia, 2016), Walking the Wrack Line: On Tidal Shifts and What Remains (Georgia, 2008), Entering the Stone: On Caves and Feeling through the Dark (Houghton Mifflin, 2003), which won a Library Journal Best Natural History Book of the Year, and Stirring the Mud: On Swamps, Bogs, and Human Imagination (Beacon Press, 2001), a Los Angeles Times Best Book of 2001. In 2015, she was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in General Nonfiction.