Megan Mayhew is an award-winning writer, journalist, and cultural critic whose work explores the natural world, women, culture, and power.

She is the author of four books with Scribner: Birds of a Lesser Paradise, Almost Famous Women, How Strange a Season, and the forthcoming The International Sweethearts of Rhythm, a cultural history of the groundbreaking interracial all-women swing band that rose to national prominence during World War II. How Strange a Season was a New York Times Editors' Choice and one of The New Yorker's Best Books of 2022, and was longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, The Story Prize, and the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award.

Megan's journalism, essays, criticism, and fiction have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Guardian, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, Harper's Bazaar, and elsewhere. Her short fiction has appeared twice in The Best American Short Stories and on NPR's Selected Shorts. Her writing on climate change and the natural world received the Southern Environmental Law Center's Phil Reed Environmental Writing Award.

Megan serves as Director of Conservation and Policy Communications at Mass Audubon, where she works at the intersection of conservation, climate, policy, and public storytelling. She is also Director of the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers' Conference at Middlebury College, where she helps shape a national community of writers engaging with the environment and natural world.

Her work across literature and conservation is rooted in a longstanding interest in how stories shape our relationship to place, other species, and one another. She has taught creative writing and environmental literature for nearly two decades and previously served as Director of Creative Writing at Middlebury College and Associate Director of the MFA program at Bennington College. She has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and the American Library in Paris and serves on the Thoreau Prize Committee.

Megan has also worked in documentary film, including co-producing It Will Be Different for You, about Olympic mountain biker Lea Davison, and developing a documentary about conservationist Sandy West. Her photography has appeared in The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, Audubon, and Southern Cultures.

She lives in Vermont.