Elizabeth Kolbert

Last updated

Elizabeth Kolbert
Elizabeth Kolbert 0350.JPG
Born (1961-07-06) July 6, 1961 (age 62)
NationalityAmerican
Alma mater Yale University
Occupation(s)Journalist and author
Awards

Elizabeth Kolbert (born July 6, 1961) is an American journalist, author, and visiting fellow at Williams College.

Contents

She is best known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History , [1] and as an observer and commentator on the environment for The New Yorker magazine. [2]

The Sixth Extinction was a New York Times bestseller and won the Los Angeles Times ' book prize for science and technology. Her book Under a White Sky was one of The Washington Post's ten best books of 2021. Kolbert is a two-time National Magazine Award winner, and in 2022 was awarded the BBVA Biophilia Award for Environmental Communication.

Her work has appeared in The Best American Science and Nature Writing and The Best American Essays .

Kolbert served as a member of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' Science and Security Board from 2017 to 2020. [3]

Early life

Kolbert spent her early childhood in the Bronx; her family then relocated to Larchmont, where she remained until 1979.

After graduating from Mamaroneck High School, Kolbert spent four years studying literature at Yale University. In 1983, she was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to study at Universität Hamburg, in Germany. Her brother, Dan Kolbert of Portland, Maine, is a well-known builder and author.

Career

Elizabeth Kolbert started working for The New York Times as a stringer in Germany in 1983. In 1985, she went to work for the Metro desk. Kolbert served as the Times' Albany bureau chief from 1988 to 1991 and wrote the Metro Matters column from 1997 to 1998.

Since 1999, she has been a staff writer for The New Yorker . [2]

She was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for The Sixth Extinction in 2015. [4]

Personal life

Kolbert resides in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with her husband, John Kleiner, and three sons (Ned, Matthew, and Aaron). [5]

Recognition

Bibliography

Books

Essays and reporting

Introductions, forewords and other contributions

Critical studies and reviews of Kolbert's work

Field notes from a catastrophe
The sixth extinction
Under a white sky

———————

Notes
  1. On White nose syndrome.
  2. The Paleolithic diet.
  3. Beecher's Trilobite Bed.
  4. Renzo Piano.
  5. Title in the online table of contents is "Paris, Syria, and climate change".
  6. Online version is titled "Morgan Freeman's 'Ben-Hur'".
  7. Online version is titled "Our automated future".
  8. Online version is titled "Why facts don't change our minds".
  9. Online version is titled "James Turrell makes light physical".
  10. Online version is titled "Climate change and the new age of extinction".
  11. Online version is titled "The art of building artificial glaciers".
  12. Online version is titled "What will another decade of climate crisis bring?".
  13. Title in the online table of contents is "The climate expert who delivered news no one wanted to hear". Originally published in the June 29, 2009 issue.
  14. A review of Martin J. Sherwin's Gambling with armageddon : nuclear roulette from Hiroshima to the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York : Knopf, 2020). Includes information from recently declassified sources.
  15. Online version is titled "Have we already been visited by aliens?".
  16. Online version is titled "The deep sea is filled with treasure, but it comes at a price".
  17. Online version is titled "How did fighting climate change become a partisan issue?".
  18. Online version is titled "The Little-Known World of Caterpillars".

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John McPhee</span> American writer

John Angus McPhee is an American writer. He is considered one of the pioneers of creative nonfiction. He is a four-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in the category General Nonfiction, and he won that award on the fourth occasion in 1999 for Annals of the Former World. In 2008, he received the George Polk Career Award for his "indelible mark on American journalism during his nearly half-century career". Since 1974, McPhee has been the Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University.

Louis Menand is an American critic, essayist, and professor who wrote the Pulitzer-winning book The Metaphysical Club (2001), an intellectual and cultural history of late 19th- and early 20th-century America.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Roz Chast</span> American cartoonist

Roz Chast is an American cartoonist and a staff cartoonist for The New Yorker. Since 1978, she has published more than 800 cartoons in The New Yorker. She also publishes cartoons in Scientific American and the Harvard Business Review.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Seabrook</span> American writer

John Seabrook is an American writer.

William Finnegan is a staff writer at The New Yorker and author of works of international journalism. He has specially addressed issues of racism and conflict in Southern Africa and politics in Mexico and South America, as well as poverty among youth in the United States, and is well known for his writing on surfing.

Dexter Price Filkins is an American journalist known primarily for his coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for The New York Times. He was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for his dispatches from Afghanistan, and won a Pulitzer in 2009 as part of a team of Times reporters for their dispatches from Pakistan and Afghanistan. He has been called "the premier combat journalist of his generation". He currently writes for The New Yorker.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lawrence Wright</span> American writer and journalist (born 1947)

Lawrence Wright is an American writer and journalist, who is a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine, and fellow at the Center for Law and Security at the New York University School of Law. Wright is best known as the author of the 2006 nonfiction book Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. Wright is also known for his work with documentarian Alex Gibney who directed film versions of Wright's one man show My Trip to Al-Qaeda and his book Going Clear. His 2020 novel, The End of October, a thriller about a pandemic, was released in April 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, to generally positive reviews.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dan Chiasson</span> American poet

Dan Chiasson is an American poet, critic, and journalist. The Sewanee Review called Chiasson "the country’s most visible poet-critic." He is the Lorraine Chao Wang Professor of English Literature at Wellesley College.

Margaret Talbot is an American essayist and non-fiction writer. She is also the daughter of the veteran Warner Bros. actor Lyle Talbot, whom she profiled in an October 2012 The New Yorker article and in her book The Entertainer: Movies, Magic and My Father's Twentieth Century. She is also the co-author with her brother David Talbot of a book about political activists in the 1960s, By the Light of Burning Dreams.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anand Gopal</span>

Anand Gopal is a writer for The New Yorker magazine and author of No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban and the War Through Afghan Eyes, which describes the travails of three Afghans caught in the war on terror. It was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction and the 2014 National Book Award for non-fiction. He has won many major journalism prizes, including the National Magazine Award, for his magazine writing on conflict in the Middle East.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elif Batuman</span> American writer and academic (born 1977)

Elif Batuman is an American author, academic, and journalist. She is the author of three books: a memoir, The Possessed, and the novels The Idiot, which was a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and Either/Or. Batuman is a staff writer for The New Yorker.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kathryn Schulz</span> American journalist and author

Kathryn Schulz is an American journalist and author. She is a staff writer at The New Yorker. In 2016, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for her article on the risk of a major earthquake and tsunami in the Pacific Northwest. In 2023, she won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir or Biography.

The New Journal is a magazine at Yale University that publishes creative nonfiction about Yale and New Haven. Inspired by New Journalism writers like Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese, the student-run publication was established by Daniel Yergin and Peter Yeager in 1967 to publish investigative pieces and in-depth interviews. It publishes five issues per year. The magazine is distributed free of charge at Yale and in New Haven and was among the first university publications not to charge a subscription fee.

<i>The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History</i> 2014 non-fiction book written by Elizabeth Kolbert

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History is a 2014 non-fiction book written by Elizabeth Kolbert and published by Henry Holt and Company. The book argues that the Earth is in the midst of a modern, man-made, sixth extinction. In the book, Kolbert chronicles previous mass extinction events, and compares them to the accelerated, widespread extinctions during our present time. She also describes specific species extinguished by humans, as well as the ecologies surrounding prehistoric and near-present extinction events. The author received the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction for the book in 2015.

List of works by or about David Remnick, American writer and editor of The New Yorker.

A list of the published work of Adam Gopnik, American writer and editor.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Emily Nussbaum</span> American television critic (born 1966)

Emily Nussbaum is an American television critic. She served as the television critic for The New Yorker from 2011 until 2019. In 2016, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.

Hua Hsu is an American writer and academic, based in New York City. He is a professor of English at Bard College and a staff writer at The New Yorker. His work includes investigations of immigrant culture in the United States, as well as public perceptions of diversity and multiculturalism. He is the author of A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure Across the Pacific. His second book, Stay True: A Memoir, was published in September 2022.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jill Lepore bibliography</span>

A list of works by or about Jill Lepore, American historian.

List of works by or about Kelefa Sanneh, American journalist and music critic.

References

  1. "2015 Pulitzer Prizes". The Pulitzer Prizes.
  2. 1 2 "Contributors: Elizabeth Kolbert". The New Yorker . Retrieved March 27, 2009.
  3. "Science and Security Board". Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. March 30, 2017.
  4. "The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, by Elizabeth Kolbert (Henry Holt)". The Pulitzer Prizes. 2015. Retrieved July 24, 2021.
  5. "Elizabeth Kolbert". Simon & Schuster. November 14, 2012. Archived from the original on November 14, 2012. Retrieved July 25, 2021.
  6. "AAAS Science Journalism Award Recipients". American Association for the Advancement of Science. Archived from the original on October 21, 2013. Retrieved November 20, 2013.
  7. "National Magazine Awards 2006 Winners Announced at 40th Anniversary Celebration". magazine.org. Archived from the original on November 22, 2018. Retrieved November 20, 2013.
  8. "Elizabeth Kolbert". lannan.org.
  9. "National Academies Keck Futures Initiative – -". keckfutures.org. Archived from the original on November 22, 2018. Retrieved November 20, 2013.
  10. "The Heinz Awards: Elizabeth Kolbert". The Heinz Awards. Retrieved August 26, 2016.
  11. "ASME Announces the Winners of the 2010 National Magazine Awards". magazine.org. Archived from the original on November 22, 2018. Retrieved November 20, 2013.
  12. "Elizabeth Kolbert – John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation". Archived from the original on December 3, 2013. Retrieved November 25, 2013.
  13. "The Pulitzer Prizes – Citation". The Pulitzer Prizes.
  14. Getty, Matt. "The Sam Rose '58 and Julie Walters Prize at Dickinson College for Global Environmental Activism". Dickinson College.
  15. "2017 SEAL Environmental Journalism Award Winners – SEAL Awards". SEAL Awards. September 26, 2017. Retrieved October 12, 2017.
  16. "Search Results for "kolbert" – American Academy of Arts and Letters". American Academy of Arts and Letters. n.d. Retrieved July 24, 2021.

Commons-logo.svg Media related to Elizabeth Kolbert at Wikimedia Commons