LONG BIO
Megan Mayhew-Bergman is an author, speaker, and teacher who writes about the natural world and remarkable women in a science & art-forward way - and likes to help others do the same.
She is the author of three books, Birds of a Lesser Paradise, Almost Famous Women, and How Strange a Season, which Scribner published in March 2022. How Strange a Season was featured as a New York Times Editor’s Choice and in the New Yorker’s Best Books of 2022 list, and was longlisted for the 2023 Joyce Carol Oates Fiction Prize, The Story Prize, and the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award. She is currently writing a book on the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, also with Scribner.
Megan is a journalist, essayist, and critic. She has written columns on climate change and the natural world for The Guardian and The Paris Review. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s Bazaar, and elsewhere. Her short fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories 2011 and 2015, and on NPR’s Selected Shorts.
She was awarded the Garrett Award for Fiction and the Phil Reed Environmental Writing Award for Journalism, and fellowships at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the American Library in Paris. She serves on the Thoreau Prize Committee and on the board of Hildene, a Lincoln Family Home.
She currently teaches literature and environmental writing at Middlebury College, where she also serves as Director of the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference. She is also an instructor in the California Coast and Climate Semester and MPA in Sustainability Program, and oversees an Environmental Storytelling Series.
Megan co-produced a documentary on the mountain biker Lea Davison, and her photography has been published in The Guardian, Wall Street Journal, Audubon, and Southern Cultures. She founded Open Field, a non-profit geared toward increasing the accessibility of environmental storytelling and advocacy skills, and co-founded GreenStory, an environmental narrative consulting firm.