Rowan Jacobsen

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Rowan Jacobsen

Rowan Jacobsen

Rowan Jacobsen is the James Beard Award-winning author of A Geography of Oysters: The Connoisseur’s Guide to Oyster Eating in North AmericaFruitless Fall: The Collapse of the Honey Bee and the Coming Agricultural Crisis, and The Living Shore, about our ancient connection to estuaries and their potential to heal the oceans. He has written for the New York TimesNewsweek, Harper’sOutside, Eating Well, Forbes, Popular Science, and others, and his work has been anthologized in The Best American Science and Nature Writingand Best Food Writing collections. Whether visiting endangered oystermen in Louisiana or cacao-gathering tribes in the Bolivian Amazon, his subject is how to maintain a sense of place in a world of increasing placelessness. His 2010 book, American Terroir, was named one of theTop Ten Books of the Year by Library Journal. His newest, Shadows on the Gulf: A Journey Through Our Last Great Wetland, was released in 2011. His Outside Magazine piece “Heart of Dark Chocolate” received the 2011 Lowell Thomas Award from the Society of American Travel Writers for best adventure story of the year. He is a 2012 Alicia Patterson Foundation fellow, writing about endangered diversity on the borderlands between India, Myanmar, and China.

Brimming with engaging information about a little-known region and leavened with moments of grace… Rowan Jacobsen succeeds in painting the ‘sort of cubist portrait of a beautiful and sometimes contradictory region’ he envisioned. And this fragmented portrait turns out to be all the more beautiful and melancholy for being accompanied by the persistent, doleful sounds of a pipe organ.
— Wall Street Journal