Margaret Renkl

Last updated
Margaret Renkl
Born1961 (age 62–63)
Andalusia, Alabama, U.S.
Education Auburn University (BA)
University of South Carolina (MA)
Employer The New York Times
SpouseHaywood Moxley
Children3

Margaret Renkl (born October 1961) is an American writer and contributing opinion writer for the New York Times who lives in Nashville, Tennessee. Renkl is the author of Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss, and two other books. Her weekly opinion columns focus on nature, politics, and culture.

Contents

Early life and education

Renkl was born in Andalusia, Alabama, and moved with her family to Birmingham, Alabama as a child. Renkl spent much of her childhood out-of-doors, with frequent visits to her maternal grandparents, who remained in Lower Alabama.

Renkl's mother was descended from peanut farmers, and her father was an apartment complex developer. [1] Renkl, who attended Auburn University, described herself as an eager and enthusiastic undergraduate student who "wanted to learn everything, read everything, think about everything." While a student, she was involved in running a literary magazine, and upon graduation, [2] was accepted into a literature PhD program at the University of Pennsylvania. [3] Renkl, who had never traveled farther north than Tennessee, found the northern climate inhospitable. The doctoral program, with its focus on critical theory, was a poor fit for her poetic aspirations. [4] Renkl returned south after one semester, and later obtained a master's degree from a graduate writing program at the University of South Carolina. [1]

Career

Renkl taught high school English at Harpeth Hall, a private school in Nashville, Tennessee, from 1987 to 1997. [5] She quit teaching after a difficult pregnancy with her second child, and spent years freelance writing for various publications, [1] including Glamour, Guernica, Literary Hub, Oxford American, and River Teeth. [6] In October 2009, Renkl founded Chapter16, an online literary magazine featuring Tennessee and Tennessee-adjacent writers. [7] She stepped down as founding editor after ten years. [8] Renkl's work began appearing in The New York Times in 2015, with an essay focusing on caregiving for elderly relatives. [9] Soon after, she was offered a weekly column, writing early pieces on the backyard drama of nesting birds [10] and the way the 2016 United States presidential election played out in her local neighborhood. [11] Renkl devoted fifteen years to writing poetry, but eventually focused more on prose after concluding that poetry would "require an intensity and concentration that ultimately I just don’t have." [12]

Late Migrations

The raw material for Renkl's 2019 nonfiction book, Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss, arose from a weekly blog she began as she and her husband dealt with caring for Renkl's parents and mother-in-law. The book interweaves short pieces on nature and the natural world with family stories and memories from Renkl's life. Renkl had not planned to turn the material into a book, considering the blog a way to process her grief. "I found that I took a lot of comfort from watching the natural cycles in my yard. I didn't actually start writing the nature essays until a few months later, when the primary season for the 2018 election really started gearing up. And all this ugliness was coming out." [13] The book, which includes artwork by Renkl's brother, Billy Renkl, [1] received generally favorable reviews, [14] [15] [16] [17] though some critics found the book hard to characterize. [18] [19]

Influences

While Renkl's formal education was mainly focused around poetry, she eventually settled on her current prose style, including some notably short micro-essays. Renkl names E.B. White, Annie Dillard, Mary Oliver, Wendell Berry, and James Agee among the writers who have influenced her work. [20] In Death of a Cat, Renkl explicitly links an existential understanding of the animal world to E.B. White's Death of a Pig. [21] Danny Heitman of The Wall Street Journal noted that Renkl's nature writing "seems like a belated answer to White." [19] Renkl's nature writing has been compared to naturalist writers such as Annie Dillard and Peter Matthiessen. [22] Late Migrations was selected for Jenna Bush Hager's book club; Hager compared it to writing by Mary Oliver. [23]

The South

Renkl is influenced by her upbringing and life in the American South. In her opinion essay "What is a Southern Writer?" Renkl grapples with the region's meaning, both in her work and for the canon as a whole, writing:

People can hardly help loving the hands that rocked their cradles or the landscapes that shaped their souls, but I doubt there’s a single writer in the South for whom life here isn’t a source of deep ambivalence. And yet all the writers I’ve mentioned had opportunities to leave—many actually did leave for a time before returning to stay. It has all made me wonder: What if being a Southern writer has nothing to do with rural tropes or lyrical prose or a lush landscape or humid heat so thick it’s hard to breathe? What if being a Southern writer is foremost a matter of growing up in a deeply troubled place and yet finding it somehow impossible to leave? Of seeing clearly the failings of home and nevertheless refusing to flee? [24]

Personal life

Renkl is married to Haywood Moxley, a writer and English teacher. They have three adult sons. [25]

Bibliography

Poetry

Essays

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Margaret Atwood</span> Canadian writer (born 1939)

Margaret Eleanor Atwood is a Canadian novelist, poet, and literary critic. Since 1961, she has published 18 books of poetry, 18 novels, 11 books of nonfiction, nine collections of short fiction, eight children's books, two graphic novels, and a number of small press editions of both poetry and fiction. Her best-known work is the 1985 dystopian novel The Handmaid's Tale. Atwood has won numerous awards and honors for her writing, including two Booker Prizes, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Governor General's Award, the Franz Kafka Prize, Princess of Asturias Awards, and the National Book Critics and PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Awards. A number of her works have been adapted for film and television.

Barry Holstun Lopez was an American author, essayist, nature writer, and fiction writer whose work is known for its humanitarian and environmental concerns. In a career spanning over 50 years, he visited more than 80 countries, and wrote extensively about a variety of landscapes including the Arctic wilderness, exploring the relationship between human cultures and nature. He won the National Book Award for Nonfiction for Arctic Dreams (1986) and his Of Wolves and Men (1978) was a National Book Award finalist. He was a contributor to magazines including Harper's Magazine, National Geographic, and The Paris Review.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alice Hoffman</span> American novelist

Alice Hoffman is an American novelist and young-adult and children's writer, best known for her 1995 novel Practical Magic, which was adapted for a 1998 film of the same name. Many of her works fall into the genre of magic realism and contain elements of magic, irony, and non-standard romances and relationships.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Grace Paley</span> American poet

Grace Paley, née Goodside was an American short story author, poet, teacher, and political activist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lan Samantha Chang</span> American fiction writer

Lan Samantha Chang is an American novelist and short story writer. She is the author of The Family Chao (2022) and short story collection Hunger. For her fiction, which explores Chinese American experiences, she is a recipient of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Berlin Prize, the PEN/Open Book Award and the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Aimee Nezhukumatathil</span> American poet

Aimee Nezhukumatathil is an American poet and essayist. Nezhukumatathil draws upon her Filipina and Malayali Indian background to give her perspective on love, loss, and land.

West Virginia University Press is a university press and publisher in the state of West Virginia. A part of West Virginia University, the press publishes books and journals with a particular emphasis on Appalachian studies, history, higher education, the social sciences, and interdisciplinary books about energy, environment, and resources. The press also has a small but highly regarded program in fiction and creative nonfiction, including Deesha Philyaw's The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, winner of the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, winner of the Story Prize 2020/21, winner of the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, and a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction in 2020. John Warner wrote in the Chicago Tribune, "If you are wondering what the odds are of a university press book winning three major awards, being a finalist for a fourth, and going to a series on a premium network, please know that this is the only example." In 2021, another of WVU Press's works of fiction, Jim Lewis's Ghosts of New York, was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. WVU Press also collaborates on digital publications, notably West Virginia History: An Open Access Reader.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mobile–Tensaw River Delta</span> Large river delta system located in Alabama, USA

The Mobile–Tensaw River Delta is the largest river delta and wetland in Alabama. It encompasses approximately 260,000 acres (110,000 ha) in a 40-by-10-mile area and is the second largest delta in the contiguous United States. This large river delta is approximately 45 miles long and averages 8 miles wide, being 16 miles wide at its widest point. It covers approximately 300 square miles. Of its 260,000 acres, 20,000 acres consist of open water, 10,000 acres of marsh, 70,000 acres of swamp; and more than 85,000 acres of bottomland forest. It drains an area of about 44,000 sq miles, which includes 64% of Alabama and small portions of Georgia and Mississippi.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Melissa Studdard</span> American poet

Melissa Studdard was born in Tuscaloosa, Alabama and is an American author, poet, talk show host, and professor. Her most recent book is the poetry collection Dear Selection Committee. The title poem from her collection I Ate the Cosmos for Breakfast was produced as a short film and featured as an official selection at the Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival and the Minneapolis–Saint Paul International Film Festival. Her middle-grade novel, Six Weeks to Yehidah won a Forward National Literature Award and Pinnacle Book Achievement Award. The accompanying journal, My Yehidah, was released in December 2011 and was adopted by art and play therapists for clinical use in adolescent therapy sessions.

Adam Ross is an American writer and editor best known for his 2010 novel Mr. Peanut.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David G. Haskell</span> British and American biologist and writer

David George Haskell is a British and American biologist, writer, and William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Biology and Environmental Studies at Sewanee: The University of the South, in Sewanee, Tennessee. He is a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist in General Nonfiction. In addition to scientific papers, he has written essays, poems, op-eds, and the books The Forest Unseen, The Songs of Trees, Thirteen Ways to Smell a Tree, and Sounds Wild and Broken.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Laura Pritchett</span> American writer (born 1971)

Laura Pritchett is an American author whose work is rooted in the natural world. Known for championing the complex and contemporary American West and giving voice to the working class, her books have garnered the PEN USA Award, the Milkweed National Fiction Prize, the WILLA, the High Plains Book Award, and others. Both her fiction and nonfiction often focus on issues of ecology, conservation, climate change, and social justice issues.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Caroline Randall Williams</span> American writer

Caroline Randall Williams is an American author, poet and academic best known for the 2015 cookbook Soul Food Love, co-written with her mother, author Alice Randall, and published by Random House. In February, 2016, Soul Food Love received the NAACP Image Award in Literature (Instructional).

Lydia Peelle is an American fiction writer. In 2009 the National Book Foundation named her a "5 under 35" Honoree.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Thomas Vinciguerra</span> American journalist (1963–2021)

Thomas Vinciguerra was an American journalist, editor, and author. A founding editor of The Week magazine, he published about popular culture, nostalgia and other subjects in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker and GQ.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yaa Gyasi</span> Ghanaian-American novelist (born 1989)

Yaa Gyasi is a Ghanaian American novelist. Her work, most notably her 2016 debut novel Homegoing and her 2020 novel Transcendent Kingdom, features themes of lineage, generational trauma, and Black and African identities. At the age of 26, Gyasi won the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Award for Best First Book, the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel, the National Book Foundation's "5 under 35" honors for 2016 and the 2017 American Book Award. She was awarded a Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Literature in 2020. As of 2019, Gyasi lives in Brooklyn, New York.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jeanine Cummins</span> American author

Jeanine Cummins is an American author of Irish and Puerto Rican heritage. She has written four books: a memoir titled A Rip in Heaven and three novels, The Outside Boy,The Crooked Branch, and American Dirt.American Dirt was a notable success, selling over 3 million copies in 37 languages. However, it also gained controversy within the American literary community for its perceived cultural exploitation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Marcia Chatelain</span> American historian

Marcia Chatelain is an American academic who serves as the Penn Presidential Compact Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2021, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for History for her book Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America (2020), for which she also won the James Beard Award for Writing in 2022. Chatelain was the first black woman to win the latter award.

Stephanie Danler is an American author. Her debut novel, Sweetbitter (2016), was a New York Times bestseller and was adapted into a television show by the same name. She released a memoir, Stray, in 2020. Danler has a novel forthcoming from Scribner Books titled Smog, described as a neo-noir novel that takes place in Los Angeles during the 1990s.

Grace Talusan is a Filipino American writer. Her 2019 memoir, The Body Papers, won the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing and the Massachusetts Book Award in nonfiction and was a New York Times Editors' Choice selection. Her short story, "The Book of Life and Death," was the Boston Book Festival's One City One Story selection in 2020.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 "Alabama's Margaret Renkl, writer for New York Times, launches first book, 'Late Migrations'". Alabama NewsCenter. 2019-08-14. Retrieved 2020-08-20.
  2. ↑ Renkl, Margaret (2019-03-25). "Opinion | Let's Hear It for State U." The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 2020-08-20.
  3. ↑ Jewell, Jennifer (2019-09-26). "A NATURAL HISTORY OF LOVE & LOSS - LATE MIGRATIONS with MARGARET RENKL". jewellgarden. Retrieved 2020-08-20.
  4. ↑ Renkl, Margaret (2019). Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss. Milkweed Press. pp. 221–222.
  5. ↑ "Welcome Back Margaret Renkl". www.harpethhall.org. Retrieved 2020-08-20.
  6. ↑ Brady, Shannon (2019-08-05). "Late Migrations: A Conversation with Margaret Renkl". The Adroit Journal. Retrieved 2020-08-20.
  7. ↑ "Welcome!". chapter16.org. 7 October 2009. Retrieved 2020-08-20.
  8. ↑ "Founding Editor of Chapter16.org to Step Down". Humanities Tennessee. Retrieved 2020-08-20.
  9. ↑ Renkl, Margaret (2015-08-08). "Caregiving: A Burden So Heavy, Until It's Gone". Opinionator. Retrieved 2020-08-21.
  10. ↑ Renkl, Margaret (2016-07-30). "Opinion | Red in Beak and Claw". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 2020-08-20.
  11. ↑ Renkl, Margaret (2016-10-22). "Opinion | Good Neighbors, No Politics". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 2020-08-20.
  12. ↑ "Story by Story: Talking with Margaret Renkl". The Rumpus.net. 2019-04-17. Retrieved 2020-08-21.
  13. ↑ "Grief and the nature of the South". al. 2019-09-23. Retrieved 2020-08-21.
  14. ↑ LATE MIGRATIONS | Kirkus Reviews.
  15. ↑ jaylynnkorrell (2019-09-05). "Book Review: Late Migrations". Independent Book Review. Retrieved 2020-08-21.
  16. ↑ "Review of Late Migrations". www.forewordreviews.com. 27 June 2019. Retrieved 2020-08-21.
  17. ↑ "Review: 'Late Migrations,' by Margaret Renkl". Star Tribune. 5 July 2019. Retrieved 2020-08-21.
  18. ↑ "A Perfect Summer Book, 'Late Migrations' Reminds Us Of Life's Beauty And Fragility". NPR.org. Retrieved 2020-08-21.
  19. 1 2 Heitman, Danny (2019-07-12). "'Late Migrations' Review: Flora, Fauna and Family". Wall Street Journal. ISSN   0099-9660 . Retrieved 2020-08-21.
  20. ↑ jenniferpuryear (2019-06-30). "Love, Loss, and Margaret Renkl". Bacon on the Bookshelf. Retrieved 2020-08-21.
  21. ↑ Renkl, Margaret (2020-08-03). "Opinion | Death of a Cat". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 2020-08-21.
  22. ↑ Rodriguez, Leah (2019-07-09). "Margaret Renkl Melds Personal History with the Natural World in 'Late Migrations'". Paperback Paris. Retrieved 2020-08-21.
  23. ↑ "Jenna Bush Hager Selects Margaret Renkl's Late Migrations for Book Club". Kirkus Reviews. Retrieved 2020-08-21.
  24. ↑ Renkl, Margaret (2018-07-09). "Opinion | What Is a Southern Writer, Anyway?". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 2020-08-21.
  25. ↑ jenniferpuryear (2016-07-12). "Summer Reading Special: He Said/She Said featuring Haywood Moxley..." Bacon on the Bookshelf. Retrieved 2020-08-21.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.