Nick Neely grew up south of San Francisco, in the oak and chaparral on the bay side of the Santa Cruz Mountains. He holds an MA in Literature and the Environment from the University of Nevada, Reno, and MFAs in nonfiction and poetry from Hunter College and Columbia University. He is the author of two books, Alta California and Coast Range. His nonfiction has appeared in magazines such as Orion, Audubon, Mother Jones, High Country News, Kenyon Review, The Threepenny Review, The Georgia Review, and Ecotone. He is a recipient of PEN/Northwest's Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency, a UC Berkeley-11th Hour Food and Farming Journalism Fellowship, and the 2015 John Burroughs Nature Essay Award. He lives in Hailey, Idaho, with his wife, the painter Sarah Bird.
Praise for Coast Range
"Neely is a graceful, subtle writer with a sharp eye for the easily
missed details of his surroundings."—Outside Online
"These are nature essays with a difference: the sureness and
delicacy with which Nick Neely directs our attention from the
miracles of the outer world to the gyroscopic peculiarities of his
consciousness make for a very satisfying reading experience."
—Phillip Lopate, author of To Show and Tell and The Art of the
Personal Essay
"Welcome a strong new voice for the silver beaches, pine forests,
and shining rivers of the Pacific Northwest. Like the agates in his
pockets, Nick Neely's essays are highly polished, translucent, but
shot through with hard veins of natural science. Imagine Wallace
Stegner in conversation with Ed Ricketts, when they are both young
and still astonished. Then you can begin to understand the
creativity, the power, the beauty, and the fun of Coast Range."
—Kathleen Dean Moore, author of Great Tide Rising
"What a superb writer Nick Neely is and just the kind of natural
history observer we need in a time of fierce change. He enlivens
chiton, newt, hummingbird in the sapling outside the Safeway, and
more, with keen eyes and ears, quick veers of mind and syntax, and
an abiding sense of the connection between the wild and the made
worlds. Precise, gorgeous and imaginatively wed to both science and
myth, his rendering of Coyote brings the creature smack–dab into
twenty–first–century America, as soul–troubling as ever he was in
myth and landscape. A fine collection to read and savor." —Alison
Hawthorne Deming, author of Zoologies and The Edges of the
Civilized World
"What makes Neely's collection so compelling is the detail, his
artful engagement of our senses to feel the weight of the agate,
taste the flake of the fish, trace the letters carved into the
madrone trees, and then smell the sour decay of atonement and fall
in love with this place." — Orion
"Neely poetically and introspectively guides our attention to
things we might not notice or might not know, his curiosity and
wonder driving each story along with his splendid powers of
observation, plus a bit of research . . . Each piece feels like an
adventure, an opportunity to appreciate the world, a tiny mystery
solved." —Missoula Independent
"Finely tuned essays that vary intriguingly in form and tone . . .
Neely capably explores the complexity of his subjects with polish
and finesse, looking carefully and thinking deeply." — Kirkus
Reviews (starred review)
"Neely's vigilant, wry commentaries on his native patch of the west
coast are not only in the tradition of Thoreau's Walden but in an
older and wider one that he shares with Thoreau: what Thoreau calls
'the great–dragon Tree' of mythic vision that is associated with
Homer and Sophocles but also lives in Aristotle, Herodotus, Pliny,
and other classical naturalists." — David Wallace, author of
Mountains and Marshes and The Untamed Garden
"Neely's fascination with a huge swath of the Pacific Northwest
coastal range is evident in this quiet essay collection that
focuses on small details described in carefully studied prose . . .
This is the sort of introspective writing that will appeal strongly
to readers seeking to gain a deeper appreciation of their
environment, and those with curiosity about or longing for the
region he knows so well. Neely clearly spent a lot of time watching
and listening, both to the people and animals that call the area
home, and his observations have real staying power."— Booklist
"Fans of Joseph Wood Krutch, Henry David Thoreau, and John Muir
will enjoy these essays even if they are not familiar with the
specific geographic area." — Library Journal
"In Nick Neely's new book, Coast Range: A Collection From the
Pacific Edge, he aptly captures that childlike sense of wonder
about the natural world . . . The essays are just as pleasant to
read for his meticulously arranged prose and artfully crafted
imagery as they are for their educational qualities."— Idaho
Mountain Express
"Nick Neely is a searcher and, lucky for us, a collector as well.
Coast Range is his collection, his 'open–air curiosity cabinet,'
full of newts, agates, madrones, mushrooms, coyote, salmon, paw
prints, bones and beautiful sentences. He is a precise writer and
his essays are brilliant in the shining sense. But as well as being
an accurate observer of the natural world, he is an exuberant
participant, and we are both pulled in and lifted up by his
generous, buoyant and ever–curious spirit. An important book, and
one full of life and joy." —David Gessner, author of All the Wild
That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner and the American West
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