Gretel Ehrlich

Gretel Ehrlich was born on a horse ranch in California and was educated at Bennington College and UCLA film school. She is the author of 13 books, including three books of narrative essays, a novel, a memoir, three books of poetry, a biography, a book of ethnology/travel, and a children’s book, among others. They include The Solace of Open Spaces (1985), Heart Mountain (1989), Drinking Dry Clouds (1991), Islands, the Universe, Home (1991), A Match to the Heart (1994), Questions of Heaven (1997), A Blizzard Year (2000), John Muir (2000), This Cold Heaven (2001), The Future of Ice (2004), In the Empire of Ice (2010),  Facing the Wave (2013), and Unsolaced (2021).

Ms. Ehrlich has published in Harper’s, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, Time, Life, National Geographic, National Geographic Adventure, Aperture, National Geographic Traveler, Architectural Digest, Orion, Shambhala Sun, Tricycle, Antaeus, and Outside, among many others.

She is the winner of many awards, among them, the 2010 PEN Thoreau Award, a Bellagio Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Harold B. Vurcell Award for distinguished prose from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts, and two Expedition Council Grants from the National Geographic Society for circumpolar travel in the high Arctic.