Skip to main content

Margaret Renkl

Biography

Margaret Renkl

Margaret Renkl is the author of THE COMFORT OF CROWS: A Backyard Year. Her earlier books are LATE MIGRATIONS: A Natural History of Love and Loss and GRACELAND, AT LAST: Notes on Hope and Heartache from the American South. She is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, where her essays appear weekly. 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.

Margaret Renkl

Books by Margaret Renkl

The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year
by Margaret Renkl - Essays, Memoir, Nonfiction

In THE COMFORT OF CROWS, Margaret Renkl presents a literary devotional: 52 chapters that follow the creatures and plants in her backyard over the course of a year. As we move through the seasons --- from a crow spied on New Year’s Day, its resourcefulness and sense of community setting a theme for the year, to the lingering bluebirds of December, revisiting the nest box they used in spring --- what develops is a portrait of joy and grief: joy in the ongoing pleasures of the natural world, and grief over winters that end too soon and songbirds that grow fewer and fewer. Along the way, we also glimpse the changing rhythms of a human life.