Margaret Renkl is the author of The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year , which won a 2024 Southern Book Prize and was a New York Times bestseller as well as Reese's Book Club's 100th pick. Her earlier titles are Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss (2019), which won the Reed Environmental Writing Award in 2020; and Graceland, at Last: Notes on Hope and Heartache from the American South (2021), which won both the Southern Book Prize and the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay in 2022. Since 2017, Renkl has served as a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times , where her essays appear on Mondays. The founding editor of Chapter 16, a daily literary publication of Humanities Tennessee, and a graduate of Auburn University and the University of South Carolina, she lives in Nashville.