Michael P. Branch

press release:

A Room of One's Own is happy to welcome Michael P. Branch, author of environmental writings collected in the books Rants from the Hill and Raising Wild!

About Michael P. Branch: Michael Branch is the winner of the Ellen Meloy Desert Writers Award and the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame Silver Pen Award. He is the author of more than 200 essays, articles, and reviews, and has given more than 250 public readings and lectures. His creative nonfiction includes pieces that have received Honorable Mention for the Pushcart Prize and been recognized as Notable Essays in The Best American Essays (three times), The Best American Science and Nature Writing, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. He is cofounder of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE). Mike is Professor of Literature and Environment in the English Department at the University of Nevada, Reno, where he cofounded the nation’s first graduate program in Literature and Environment studies.

About Raising Wild: Michael Branch built his home on a remote hilltop in the Great Basin Desert of northwestern Nevada, a wild and extreme landscape where he lives with his wife and two curious little girls. Moving between pastoral passages on the beauty found in the desert and humorous tales of the humility of being a father, Raising Wild offers an intimate portrait of a landscape where mountain lions and ground squirrels can threaten in equal measure. With Branch’s distinct lyricism and wit, this exceedingly barren landscape becomes a place resonant with the rattle of snakes, the clatter of pronghorn antelope, and the rustle of juniper trees, a place that is teeming with energy, surprise, and an endless web of connections. Part memoir, part homage to an environment all-to-often dismissed as inhospitable, Raising Wild presents an intergenerational approach to nature, family, and the forgotten language of wildness.

About Rants from the Hill: Welcome to the land of wildfire, hypothermia, desiccation, and rattlers. The stark and inhospitable high-elevation landscape of Nevada’s Great Basin Desert may not be an obvious (or easy) place to settle down, but for self-professed desert rat Michael Branch, it’s home. Of course, living in such an unforgiving landscape gives one many things to rant about. Fortunately for us, Branch—humorist, environmentalist, and author of Raising Wild—is a prodigious ranter. From bees hiving in the walls of his house to owls trying to eat his daughters’ cat—not to mention his eccentric neighbors—adventure, humor, and irreverence abound on Branch’s small slice of the world, which he lovingly calls Ranting Hill.