Rowan Jacobsen is the author of Fruitless Fall, The Living Shore, Shadows on the Gulf, Apples of Uncommon Character, and other books. He has written for Harpers, Outside, Mother Jones, Orion, Popular Science, Audubon, Scientific American, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and others, and his writing appears frequently in the Best Food Writing and Best American Science & Nature Writing collections. He has received awards from the James Beard Foundation, the Society of American Travel Writers, and the Overseas Press Club, as well as the Green Prize in Sustainable Literature, and fellowships from the Alicia Patterson Foundation (to write about endangered cultures and critters on the borderlands between India, Myanmar, and China) and the McGraw Center for Business Journalism (to explore the disruptive potential of high-tech proteins). He was a 2017–18 Knight Science Journalism fellow at MIT, exploring the philosophical and social implications of synthetic biology.