The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

Margaret Renkl was born in 1961 in Birmingham, Alabama. A graduate of Auburn University and the University of South Carolina, she has lived for many years in Nashville, Tennessee, where she draws from her local surroundings in her writing. Renkl has become a prominent voice in contemporary American letters through her New York Times opinion columns and a string of acclaimed books, including Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss (2019), Graceland, at Last: Notes on Hope and Heartache from the American South (2021), and The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year (2023). Renkl’s work contributes to the modern tradition of American nature writing. While earlier figures like Henry David Thoreau and John Muir shaped the genre with a focus on wilderness and the solitary, often male, experience in untamed landscapes, Renkl focuses on the wildness within suburbia. Rather than writing about the vast expanse of Yosemite or Walden Pond, she zooms in on a Nashville backyard filled with chickadees, bluebirds, opossums, and crows. In this way, she aligns with a contemporary movement in nature writing that finds meaning in the overlooked, the ordinary, and the proximate.