Margaret Renkl (born October 1961) is an American writer and contributing opinion writer for the New York Times who lives in Nashville, Tennessee. Renkl is the author of Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss. Her weekly opinion columns focus on nature, politics, and culture. Early life and education Renkl was born in Andalusia, Alabama, and moved with her family to Birmingham, Alabama as a child. Renkl spent much of her childhood out-of-doors, with frequent visits to her maternal grandparents, who remained in Lower Alabama. Renkl's mother was descended from peanut farmers, and her father was an apartment complex developer. Renkl, who attended Auburn University, described herself as an eager and enthusiastic undergraduate student who "wanted to learn everything, read everything, think about everything." While a student, she was involved in running a literary magazine, and upon graduation, was accepted into a literature PhD program at the University of Pennsylvania. Renkl, who had never traveled farther north than Tennessee, found the northern climate inhospitable. The doctoral program, with its focus on critical theory, was a poor fit for her poetic aspirations. Renkl returned south after one semester, and later obtained a master's degree from a graduate writing program at the University of South Carolina. Career Renkl taught high school English at Harpeth Hall, a private school in Nashville, Tennessee, from 1987 to 1997. She quit teaching after a difficult pregnancy with her second child, and spent years freelance writing for various publications, including Glamour, Guernica, Literary Hub, Oxford American, and River Teeth. In October 2009, Renkl founded Chapter16, an online literary magazine featuring Tennessee and Tennessee-adjacent writers. She stepped down as founding editor after ten years. Renkl's work began appearing in The New York Times in 2015, with an essay focusing on caregiving for elderly relatives. Soon after, she was offered a weekly column, writing early pieces on the backyard drama of nesting birds and the way the 2016 United States presidential election played out in her local neighborhood. Renkl devoted fifteen years to writing poetry, but eventually focused more on prose after concluding that poetry would "require an intensity and concentration that ultimately I just don’t have." Late Migrations The raw material for Renkl's 2019 nonfiction book, Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss, arose from a weekly blog she began as she and her husband dealt with caring for Renkl's parents and mother-in-law. The