Random stack of books that grew spontaneously during bibliographic editing of "Beyond Walden: The Hidden History in America's Kettle Lakes and Ponds." — Random stack of books that grew spontaneously during bibliographic editing.

Writer

For the first twenty years of my career I was a typical science professor at a public research university with a grant-funded lab, graduate students, post-docs, and scientific meetings. My output was mainly peer-reviewed journal articles and invited book chapters. My audience was an “in-group” cloister of scientists and graduate students with similar expertise.

Swerve

Then two events aligned. During the 1999-2000 academic year, while on a year-long Fulbright Fellowship to Chile, that the language side of my brain lit up as a consequence of becoming fluid (not fluent) in Castillian Spanish. Second, when I returned to the United States, my field- and lab-based research program was increasingly being challenged by the imminent breakup and extinction of the Department of Geology and Geophysics.

Title page photo of Concord, MA floodplain by Amani Willett for the article “Why Concord?” in the November 2025 The Atlantic.

At this point, I made an abrupt and deliberate turn toward writing, rather than research, as my main scholarly activity. In 2002, after seventeen drafts in hard copy, my first book, Stone by Stone, became a surprise bestseller and won the 2003 Connecticut Book Award for nonfiction. I also began dabbling with freelance essay writing for the Hartford Courant, Boston Globe, Providence Journal, and the New York Times. By 2003, I was a regular essayist and weekly opinion columnist for the Hartford Courant, Connecticut’s flagship daily, then with a print circulation nearing 300,000. After publishing nearly 500 articles, this gig ended in 2018 when print journalism was tanking and my esteemed editors “retired.” After leaving the Courant, the Wall Street Journal, with a circulation near 4 million, invited me to be a contract book reviewer.

Present

Since 1998, I’ve published five books for general readers as a form of scholarly engagement, ranging from a 1998 Smithsonian award-winning illustrated children’s book Stone Wall Secrets to the first Guide to Walden Pond published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (now Mariner Books) in March 2018. I’ve also published three peer-reviewed scholarly books, the latest being The Walden Experiments: The Science of Henry David Thoreau forthcoming from Princeton University Press. Throughout it all, my literary agent has been Lisa Adams at the Garamond Agency.

Roots and Dirt — Roots & Soil at Walden Pond.

Increasingly, I’m turning toward long-form journalism, publishing in The Atlantic in 2025 and Smithsonian in 2023. The latter was listed as Best History Writing for 2023 by the History News Network.

Owing to a shift in my principal scholarly activity, I designed, piloted, and teach a new course for the department of Earth Sciences: ERTH 2050W – Communicating Earth and Environmental Science.

Try these quick Links to Books – Journalism — Curriculum Vitae.