Writing Across Landscapes
Journey with Craig Childs, Priyanka Kumar, and Caroline Tracey as they explore vanishing lakes, darkened skies, and wild orchards. Blending adventures, memoirs and natural history, this panel reveals how rediscovering fragile places, and the stories they hold, can reconnect us to wonder in a rapidly changing world.
| Where: | National Park Experience Stage (Seats 146, Wheelchair accessible)  |
| When: | Sat, Mar 14, 1:00 pm - 1:55 pm |
| Signing area: | Sales & Signing Area - National Parks (following presentation)
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| Genre: | Nature / Environment |
| Moderator: | Teresa Noon |
| Sponsor: | Session made possible courtesy of Western National Parks |
Panelists
Craig ChildsCraig Childs is the author of more than a dozen acclaimed books, including "Tracing Time" and "The Wild Dark". His work spans cultural history, science, and the visceral experience of life on Earth, from desert waters to pre-Columbian migrations across the American Southwest....
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Priyanka KumarPriyanka Kumar is an acclaimed naturalist and author of "Conversations with Birds," a landmark book that could help people rewild their hearts and souls, according to Psychology Today. Kumar’s newest work "The Light Between Apple Trees: Rediscovering the Wild through a Beloved American Fruit" has been called environmental writing at its best....
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Caroline TraceyCaroline Tracey is an award-winning writer and journalist whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, New York Review of Books, and High Country News. Her first book, "Salt Lakes: An Unnatural History," has just been published....
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Books:
The Wild Dark
Finding the Night Sky in the Age of Light
Craig Childs
Nature / Environment
Torrey House Press
May 2025
ISBN 9798890920188
212 pages
Buy nowA night sky is not an absence of light; it is the presence of the universe. In The Wild Dark, master storyteller Craig Childs embarks on a quest to bike from the blinding lights of the Las Vegas Strip to one of the darkest spots in North America.
Childs is a fearless explorer of both the natural world and the human imagination, making him the perfect guide to help us rediscover the heavens and to ask: “What does it do to us to not see the night sky?” In a book that is at once an adventure story, a field guide, and a celebration of wonder, Childs invites us to look up and to look inward, eyes wide and sparkling with stars. More/less
Salt Lakes
An Unnatural History
Caroline Tracey
Nature / Environment
W. W. Norton, Incorporated
March 2026
ISBN 9781324089025
Hardcover, 288 pages
Buy nowSalt lakes are some of the world’s most extraordinary ecosystems, but nearly all of
them—from the Great Salt Lake to the Aral Sea—are drying up, a harbinger of dust
storms, rising sea levels, and worsening human health.
In this dazzling love letter to
strange and delicate waters and a moving odyssey into her own identity, Caroline
Tracey takes readers across the American West and to Mexico, Argentina, and
Kazakhstan to document salt lakes, their loss, and the efforts underway to save them.
She explores how the lakes have reflected the fast–changing natural world through
Mormon diaries, Soviet realist novels, and Australian Aboriginal paintings. And she
unravels the lakes’ lessons for her own life as she finds queer love and a sense of home
in an imperfect world. An unforgettable coming–of–age story and an exquisite work of
nature writing, Salt Lakes is a moving call to fight for all that is fragile in our lives. More/less
The Light Between Apple Trees
Rediscovering the Wild Through a Beloved American Fruit
Priyanka Kumar
Nature / Environment
Island Press
September 2025
ISBN 9781642833638
252 pages
Buy now
