I am - or, at least, I long and strive to be - a creative, activist intellectual in the traditions of ecofeminism, deep ecology, green socialism, nature mysticism, and the antiwar and social justice movements. Professionally, I've been fortunate to create and collaborate on projects as an independent scholar, writer, and editor in the environmental humanities, with a special interest in people's personal experience of and relationship with the natural world. My academic background includes Master's degrees in philosophy and in religion and, in 1996, a Ph.D. in American Civilization from Harvard University, with a focus on the history of American attitudes toward nature; my dissertation was published as The Young John Muir: An Environmental Biography (University of Wisconsin Press, 1999), which won the Modern Language Association's Prize for Independent Scholars. From 1996 through 2005, I taught as an adjunct instructor on environmental history, literature, and auto/biography at Harvard and at the Cambridge (Mass.) Center for Adult Education. In 2003 I received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities to continue my studies of Muir and of environmental life-writing, subjects which continue to engage me today. During 2002-05, I worked as consultant and coeditor for the Maine Voices Project, a statewide public writing project cosponsored by The Wilderness Society and Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance, which resulted in the anthology Maine Voices: A Celebration of the People of Maine and the Places They Love (2004). From 2005 through 2009, I was creative consultant and editor of Sea Stories, an online journal of ocean memoir and poetry sponsored by the Blue Ocean Institute (www.seastories.org). Throughout my career, my intellectual and personal passion has been exploring the varied meanings of nature in people's lives, and helping my students and readers reflect on and express those meanings themselves.