David Gessner

David Gessner is an award-winning author of ten books, most recently Ultimate Glory: Frisbee, Obsession, and My Wild Youth. A former teacher of environmental writing at Harvard, Gessner is also the founder and Editor-in-Chief of the literary magazine Ecotone. He has published essays in many magazines, including Outside Magazine and the New York Times Magazine, and has won the John Burroughs Award for Best Nature Essay, a Pushcart Prize, inclusion in Best American Nonrequired Reading, and the Association for Study of Literature and the Environment’s award for best book of creative writing in 2011-12. Gessner is the Chair of the Creative Writing Department at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. He is the author of the New York Times Bestseller All the Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner and the American West. His other books include Return of the Osprey, Sick of Nature, My Green Manifesto, and The Tarball Chronicles, which won the 2012 Reed Award for Best Book on the Southern Environment. In January of 2016 he served as the host of the National Geographic Explorer television show, Call of the Wild, which explored how screens are screwing with our brains and how nature can be restorative. Gessner also puts a lot of energy into blogging for Bill and Dave's Cocktail Hour, a website he created with the writer Bill Roorbach. He also still dreams of winning Open Nationals, though it will never happen.