TFNU’s 2026 Author Dinner Event Speaker

Craig Child

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TFNU is proud to host acclaimed author and naturalist, Craig Childs as the speaker at our 2026 Author Dinner Event. This annual fundraising event for TFNU is one of our largest sources of operational revenue each year and we are thrilled to have Mr. Childs. 

Craig Childs is a hopeless tracker of wonder who has written more than a dozen books involving the natural world. His narrative nonfiction and journalism have appeared in High Country News, The Atlantic, Outside, The New York Times, NPR, Radiolab, and he is a contributing editor at Adventure Journal magazine. He’s won the Orion Book Award, the Colorado Book Award, the Galen Rowell Art of Adventure Award, and three times he’s won the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award. Home for him is off-grid in the high desert of western Colorado near the Utah border.

Books:

January 2023 - Stone Desert & Stone Desert Journal
January 2023 - Tracing Time
November 2019 - Virga & Bone; Essays from Dry Places
March 2018 - Atlas of a Lost World
October 2012 - Apocalyptic Planet: Field Guide to the Everending Earth
August 2010 - Finders Keepers; A Tale of Archaeological Plunder and Obsession
December 2007 - The Animal Dialogues; Uncommon Encounters in the Wild
February 2007 - House of Rain; Tracking a Vanished Civilization across the American Southwest
January 2005 - The Way Out; A True story of ruin and survival
January 2004 - The Desert Cries; A season of flash floods in a dry land
January 2004 - Soul of Nowhere
March 2000 - The Knowledge of Water; Discovering the essence of the American Desert.
October 1999 - Grand Canyon: Time Below the Rim

Craig Childs has published more than a dozen books of adventure, wilderness, and science. He has won the Orion Book Award, the Galen Rowell Art of Adventure Award, the Spirit of the West Award for his body of work, and three times he's won the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award. He is a contributing editor at Adventure Journal Quarterly, and his writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Outside, and The New York Times, where he's been called "a modern-day desert father." He has a B.A. in Journalism from CU Boulder with a minor in Women's Studies, and an M.A. in Desert Studies from Prescott College in Arizona. He's taught graduate courses in writing at University of Montana and the MFA programs at University of Alaska and Southern New Hampshire University. He lives off-grid in southwest Colorado.