Now in its sixth year, this acclaimed series has become a leading showcase for contemporary nature writing. The annual collections present the best of the genre, highlighting both new & distinguished voices. With this volume, American Nature Writing, published for the past five years by Sierra Club Books, begins a new association with Oregon State University Press. The eighteen selections gathered here show the rich variety of human responses to natural places. Readers encounter a wide range of settings: a village on the Baja peninsula; the high mountain trails of Glacier National Park in Montana; the undersea kelp forests near La Jolla, California; the Chihuahuan desert in New Mexico; the high-altitude ecosystems of the Tibetan Plateau; & the wilds of northern Alaska. That a Civil War battlefield & an Arizona prison cell are the settings for two essays demonstrates the surprising vitality of this literature of place.