SUNY Adirondack welcomes award-winning writer and activist

QUEENSBURY, New York (April 22, 2025) — Author and journalist Megan Mayhew-Bergman will close out SUNY Adirondack’s Writers Project series with a talk at 12:40 p.m. Monday, April 28, in the college’s Visual Arts Gallery in Dearlove Hall. 

Mayhew-Bergman writes about the natural world and remarkable women. She is the author of three books, “Birds of a Lesser Paradise,” “Almost Famous Women” and “How Strange a Season.” The latter was featured as a New York Times Editor’s Choice and in The New Yorker’s Best Books of 2022 list, and was longlisted for the 2023 Joyce Carol Oates Fiction Prize, The Story Prize and the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award. 

Mayhew-Bergman is a journalist, essayist and critic. She has written columns on climate change and the natural world for The Guardian and The Paris Review. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic and Harper’s Bazaar, among other publications. 

Her short fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories 2011 and 2015, and on NPR’s “Selected Shorts.”

She was awarded the Garrett Award for Fiction, the Phil Reed Environmental Writing Award for Journalism, and fellowships at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the American Library in Paris. She serves on the Thoreau Prize Committee and on the board of Hildene, a Lincoln Family Home. 

Mayhew-Bergman teaches literature and environmental writing at Middlebury College, where she also serves as director of the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference. She is also an instructor in the California Coast and Climate Semester and MPA in Sustainability Program, and oversees an Environmental Storytelling Series.

She co-produced a documentary on mountain biker Lea Davison, and her photography has been published in The Guardian, Wall Street Journal, Audubon and Southern Cultures. She founded Open Field, a nonprofit organization geared toward increasing accessibility of environmental storytelling and advocacy skills, and co-founded GreenStory, an environmental narrative consulting firm. 

One event remains in the Writers Project series:

Wednesday, April 30: SUNY Adirondack Creative Writing majors will read from their works

All Writers Project events are free and open to the public. They are also aired live via Zoom and can be watched at https://us06web.zoom.us/my/mccoyoffice.