Rebecca Renner
Novelist · 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.
Rebecca is seeking new literary representation.
Fiction is at the center of Rebecca’s work. She holds an MFA in fiction writing, but before that, she had years of practice. She finished her first novel at 16 after spending the summer daydreaming about pirates from her lifeguarding station.
Her adult eco-fantasy novel The Oryssead follows estranged twins drawn back into the occult world their parents fled after a curse begins blooming across their skin. Their search for a cure pulls them toward opposing magical societies and the concealed ecological crime at the foundation of our world.
Karen Russell, Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of Swamplandia!, called The Oryssead a “wildly inventive” novel, "full of twists I never saw coming."
Rebecca’s fiction has been recognized by the DISQUIET Prize for Fiction and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She was a John Woods Scholar of Fiction at the Prague Summer Program and an MFA of the Americas Scholar of Fiction, and her earlier literary work earned multiple creative-writing awards and scholarships. View all honors and awards >
Her fiction is interested in strange systems, moral complicity, ecological damage, family mythology, power, desire, and the unstable border between what people believe and what is true.
Rebecca has spent more than a decade reporting and writing ambitious stories about science, nature, wildlife, conservation, climate, psychology, culture, history, and human behavior.
Her work has appeared in:
National Geographic · The New York Times · The Atlantic · The Washington Post · Outside · The Guardian · The Paris Review · Tin House · Sierra · Slate · Glamour
Her investigative reporting has been supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.
Her National Geographic story about the vivid and unusual dreams people experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic surpassed two million views in its first week online.
Rebecca writes reported features, profiles, investigations, narrative journalism, essays, and other long-form nonfiction. She is especially drawn to subjects that become more complicated under scrutiny: scientific discoveries, hidden systems, unusual communities, environmental change, history, belief, and the gap between a familiar story and what the evidence actually shows.
Her journalism combines the instincts of a reporter with the structural and character-driven concerns of a fiction writer: deep reporting, intellectual curiosity, narrative tension, and attention to people whose lives complicate the easiest version of a story.
Rebecca is an experienced keynote speaker, festival guest, panelist, interviewer, visiting author, and teacher.
She has appeared at the Miami Book Fair, Key West Literary Seminar, Word of South Festival, Orlando Book Festival, University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications, and other literary and cultural institutions. She delivered a keynote address for Sarasota County Libraries’ Off the Page Literary Celebration.
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.
BOOK REBECCA TO SPEAK >
Rebecca is represented by a team of passionate entertainment professionals.
Literary Agent: Rebecca is seeking new representation in this field.
Film & Television: Dana Spector at Creative Artists Agency
Speaking: Andrew Wetzel at Lyceum Agency
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.