Photo by: CC Boyle Photography
The short version:
Meera Subramanian is an award-winning freelance journalist who writes narrative nonfiction about home, in the personal and planetary sense, in a time of climate crisis. Her work has appeared in publications such as Nature, The Atlantic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Orion, where she is a contributing editor. She is the co-author of A Better World Is Possible: Global Youth Confront the Climate Crisis, a nonfiction YA graphic novel (2026) and author of A River Runs Again: India’s Natural World in Crisis. She also teaches creative nonfiction at Sewanee School of Letters MFA program in Tennessee. A National Geographic Explorer and recipient of multiple grants, fellowships, and residencies, she is a perpetual wanderer who can't stop digging in the dirt to plant perennials and looking up in search of birds from her home base atop a glacial moraine on the Atlantic's western edge. You can find her at www.meerasub.org.
The not-so-short version:
Movement beyond native boundaries runs through my blood. On one side, my great-great grandfather traveled from Germany to Texas in time to draw surveyor's lines across the Lone Star state in the mid-1800s. More recently, my father made a one-way journey, too, the first in his family to leave India, disembarking his ship in New York Harbor in 1959.
I seek out stories about home in the personal and planetary sense, writing narrative nonfiction about the wild world hidden around us and within us. I'm currently part of the inaugural cohort of Community Impact Fellows at Boston University's Center for Media Innovation and Social Impact and was recently a FRONTIERS Science Journalism fellow in residency at the Basque Center for Climate Change (BC3) in Bilbao, Spain, exploring renewable energy projects. I've covered everything from the return of peregrine falcons to the near extinction of vultures, from girls' sex education in India to organic chocolate in Grenada. My second book is A Better World Is Possible: Global Youth Confront the Climate Crisis, a nonfiction YA graphic novel (Forthcoming from First Second in March 2026), done in collaboration with illustrator Danica Novgorodoff. My first book is A River Runs Again: India’s Natural World in Crisis from the Barren Cliffs of Rajasthan to the Farmlands of Karnataka, published in August 2015 by PublicAffairs (and as Elemental India: The Natural World at a Time of Crisis and Opportunity by HarperCollins India). The book was a finalist for the Orion Book Award. Publishers’ Weekly gave it a starred review, and Kirkus Reviews called it “right thinking and accusatory in all the right places.”
My work has been published in Nature, The New York Times, The NewYorker.com, Inside Climate News, Wall Street Journal, Virginia Quarterly Review, Orion, Undark, Popular Science, High Country News, USA Today, Smithsonian, Audubon, Salon, Bidoun, Discover, Saudi Aramco World, Grist, and others. Internationally, I’ve written for Caravan, India Today, Open, and GEO (India), Africa Geographic (South Africa), Internazionale (Italy), Revue Urbanisme (France), and others.
I teach creative nonfiction at the Sewanee School of Letters MFA program in Tennessee, and, in 2019-2020, served as the Currie C. and Thomas A. Barron Visiting Professor in the Environment and the Humanities at Princeton University. In 2021, my husband Stephen Prothero and I launched the Religion & Environment Story Project to train journalists, editors, and public-facing scholars interested in the intersection of the environment and religion with the goal is to bridge the divide between the too-often-siloed religion and science beats and promote new thinking and new narratives that will inform and educate the public, especially on the climate crisis. The program is currently on hiatus.
Since 2005, I've been a member of the Society of Environmental Journalists, formed to "strengthen the quality, reach and viability of journalism across all media to advance public understanding of environmental issues." The organization has been a bottomless resource for me as a freelancer, and I served on the Board of Directors from 2018 - 2021, including as President in 2020. If you want to support robust journalism covering energy and the environment, you can donate here.
In 2017-18, I worked on Finding Middle Ground, a nine-part series for InsideClimate News about how Americans perceive climate change in their own backyards, whether from a peach orchard, the back of a dogsled, or up a wind turbine. The series was a finalist for the Scripps Howard Award. The year before that I spent in Cambridge, Massachusetts as a Knight Science Journalism fellow at MIT, where I got to be a student again, saturating myself with learning without a deadlined objective in sight.
In 2018, I became a contributing editor of the gorgeous and essential magazine, Orion. From 2007-2021, I was part of the editorial team of Killing the Buddha, an award-winning online literary magazine of stories about belief, lost or found, oftentimes both. Believer, Beware: First-Person Dispatches from the Margins of Faith (Beacon Press, July 2009), an anthology featuring the best of Killing the Buddha, includes my piece “Banana Slug Psalm.”
My writing has also been anthologized in the Best American Science and Nature Writing (2022 and 2015), Letter to a Stranger: Essays to the Ones that Haunt Us (Algonquin 2022), The World As We Knew It: Dispatches From a Changing Climate (Catapult 2022), and Solastalgia: An Anthology of Emotion in a Disappearing World (The University of Virginia Press 2023), as well as multiple editions of the Best Women’s Travel Writing series, published by Travelers’ Tales (The Best Women’s Travel Writing 2011, volume 8, and volume 9).
I also have a thing for raptors. Back in 2010 and 2011, I taught environmental journalism in Kenya, as part of a Conservation Media class focusing on birds of prey, for St. Lawrence University undergraduates. Where else could we have trapped a vulture using a freshly-killed-by-lions wildebeest as bait, and then secured a little GPS backpack to follow the vulture’s movements? Exactly.
Home has been New Jersey, New Orleans, a ship, a southern music town, and multiple places in the Pacific Northwest, where I spent more than a decade working with environmental nonprofit organizations, sometimes in the city, and sometimes at the end of a dirt road. Then there was a good long stint in New York City, where I earned a master’s in journalism from NYU in Cultural Reporting and Criticism. When I'm not wandering, I'm rooted on a glacial moraine near the edge of the Atlantic, on the ancestral lands of the Wampanoag peoples, living again—thankfully—at the end of a dirt road. I prefer my hands in the dirt planting perennials and my eyes to the skies looking for birds.
P.S. I have an ambivalent relationship with social media but you can find me on Bluesky, Instagram and Facebook, and I invite you to subscribe to my occasional and free Substack, Peregrinations.
Residencies, Grants & Fellowships:
Community Impact Fellow / Boston University / Center for Media Innovation and Social Impact — 2025-26
Mass Cultural Council Grants for Creative Individuals — 2025
FRONTIERS Science Journalism fellowship — 2025
National Geographic Explorer grant — 2022
Currie C. and Thomas A. Barron Visiting Professor in the Environment and the Humanities, Princeton University — 2019-2020
Poynter Fellowship in Journalism, Yale University — February 2020
Institutes for Journalism and Natural Resources Wildfire Workshop — 2018
Knight Science Journalism fellowship at MIT — 2016-2017
Society of Environmental Journalists Diversity fellowship — October 2015
MBL Logan Science Journalism Program fellowship/Alaska Field Experience — May & July 2015
Metcalf Climate Change Adaptation seminar — May 2015
Fulbright-Nehru Senior Researcher fellowship — 2013-2014
Society of Environmental Journalists/Fund for Environmental Journalism — September 2012
Metcalf Institute Science Workshop for Journalists — June 2012
Society of Environmental Journalists 20-20-20 Fellowship — October 2010
Blue Mountain Center — October 2009
Mesa Refuge — September 2007
Institutes for Journalism and Natural Resources (Blue Mountains) — May 2006
Prizes:
Staige D. Blackford Prize for Nonfiction, for A Measure of Gratitude — 2024
True Story Award finalist, for Consider the Vulture — 2025
Covering Climate Now Award / Solutions, for India's Quest to Build the World's Largest Solar Farms — 2024
Scripps Howard Award (Topic of the Year: Divided America) finalist, for Finding Middle Ground series — 2017
Orion Book Award finalist — 2016
Santa Monica Public Library Green Prize for Sustainable Literature — 2016
Society of Environmental Journalists 11th Annual Awards for Reporting on the Environment: First Place for Outstanding Feature Story, for India's Vanishing Vultures — 2012
Staige D. Blackford Prize for Nonfiction, for India's Vanishing Vultures — 2012
Associations:
Society of Environmental Journalists
National Association of Science Writers
Investigative Reporters and Editors
Association of Writers & Writing Programs
Service:
Matthew Power Literary Reporting Award judging committee — current
Ted Scripps Fellowship in Environmental Journalism Advisory Board— current
Stephen Schneider Award for Outstanding Climate Science Communication jury— current
Society of Environmental Journalists Board Member 2018-2021 / President 2020
US State Department (C.I.E.S.) National Peer Reviewer for Fulbright journalism candidates — 2014-2017
High-resolution author photos:
