About Meera Subramanian

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I am a narrative nonfiction writer whose work has been published in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Smithsonian, Audubon, Salon, Grist, Search, and others. Since 2007, I have also been one of the senior editors of Killing the Buddha, an award-winning online literary magazine about religion, culture and politics for people made anxious by churches. Believer, Beware: First-Person Dispatches from the Margins of Faith(Beacon Press, July 2009), an anthology featuring the best of the first eight years of Killing the Buddha, includes my piece “Banana Slug Psalm.”

In June 2010, I taught environmental journalism as part of a Conservation Media class in Kenya for St. Lawrence University undergraduates. Visit the blog we did here. 

Before moving to New York City to get a master’s in journalism from NYU in Cultural Reporting and Criticism, I spent more than a decade working with environmental nonprofit organizations in the Pacific Northwest. Give me a cabin at the end of a dirt road, big fat trees heavy with lichen, naked bodies in emerald swimming holes, home-grown food and home-brewed cider.

Or gusts of wind atop the Brooklyn Bridge, Prospect Park when the leaves are changing, steamy soup dumplings in Chinatown and a Guinness poured by John at the 11th Street Bar. Straddling the mental divide between urban and rural, I seek out stories of the wild world hidden within the cityscape and ourselves, writing about everything from the return of peregrine falcons to the near extinction of vultures, from arranged marriages in India to organic chocolate in Grenada to land conservation (for the Open Space Institute) across the East Coast. I have spent extensive time, but never quite enough, exploring countries around the world, including multiple visits to see family in India, where my conversationally fluent Spanish isn’t much help.

Residencies & Fellowships:

  • 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 

Associations:

  • Society of Environmental Journalists 
  • South Asian Journalists Association

Stories

Digital media stories published elsewhere by Meera Subramanian:

Writing

Content on this site written by Meera Subramanian (includes contributory writing):