When I published my first book Wilderness and Razor Wire (Mercury House, 2000), the San Francisco Chronicle called it an "…entirely original: an edgy, ferocious, subtly complex collection of essays….” The book won the 2002 John Burroughs Medal for outstanding nature writing. I have published five books and more than a hundred articles and essays in places like the Los Angeles Times, Arizona Highways, the Gettysburg Review, and The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2000. In 2007, I won a Soros Justice Fellowship for my fourth book, Time of Grace: Thoughts on Nature, Family, and the Politics of Crime and Punishment (University of Arizona Press, 2007). I hold degrees in biology and creative writing from the University of Arizona and live with my wife in a 1890s stone cottage near Bisbee.