Rebecca Renner
Fiction Writer · Author · Journalist · Speaker
Rebecca Renner is an award-winning fiction writer, author, and journalist whose work spans invented worlds and deeply reported ones. She is the author of Gator Country: Deception, Danger, and Alligators in the Everglades, a New York Times Editors’ Choice published by Flatiron Books, and the writer of the adult eco-fantasy novel The Oryssead.
A contributor to National Geographic, her journalism has also appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Outside, The Guardian, The Paris Review, Tin House, and other national publications.
Her fiction has been recognized by the DISQUIET Prize, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Prague Summer Program, and other literary programs and awards.
An award-winning fiction writer with an MFA in fiction, Rebecca writes ambitious, genre-bending stories about strange systems, ecological stakes, family, power, and belief. Karen Russell called her novel The Oryssead a “wildly inventive eco-fantasy.”
A National Geographic contributor and Fund for Investigative Journalism grantee, Rebecca has reported for The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Outside, and other leading publications, with work reaching millions of readers.
An experienced keynote speaker and festival guest, Rebecca brings the craft of a novelist and the curiosity of an investigative journalist to lively conversations about storytelling, science, nature, creativity, learning, world-building, and human ingenuity.
Rebecca has taught creative writing at both the high-school and university levels, drawing on an MFA in fiction, a decade-plus professional writing career, and experience across fiction, journalism, essays, and narrative nonfiction.
Gator Country
Rebecca is the author of Gator Country: Deception, Danger, and Alligators in the Everglades, published by Flatiron Books.
Part investigative journalism, part natural history, part crime story, Gator Country reconstructs an extraordinary undercover wildlife investigation while examining conservation, poverty, law, history, and the uneasy relationship between people and the natural world.
Gator Country was a New York Times Editors’ Choice, a People Magazine Book of the Week, and Florida’s adult Great Read from Great Places selection for the 2024 Library of Congress National Book Festival. It received the Florida Book Awards’ Gerald Ensley Developing Writer Award and reached #4 on the Hudson News bestseller chart.
It was named among the best books or nonfiction of the year by BookPage, Amazon, The Christian Science Monitor, the Tampa Bay Times, Chicago Public Library, and other publications and institutions.
BUY GATOR COUNTRY
READ MORE ABOUT THE BOOK
