Verlyn Klinkenborg

Verlyn Klinkenborg (born 1952 in Meeker, Colorado) is an American non-fiction author, academic, and former newspaper editor known for his writings on rural America. Klinkenborg was born in Meeker, Colorado, and raised on a farm in Iowa. He attended elementary school in Clarion, Iowa, until the 6th grade before his family relocated to Osage, Iowa. His family then moved to Sacramento, California.

Klinkenborg attended the University of California, Berkeley, before earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in English literature from Pomona College. He then earned a Ph.D. from Princeton University, also in English literature. Klinkenborg taught literature and creative writing at Fordham University while living in The Bronx in the early to mid-1980s. He later taught at St. Olaf College, Bennington College, Sarah Lawrence College, Bard College, and Harvard University. In 1991, he received the Lila Wallace–Reader's Digest Writer's Award and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship.

Klinkenborg's books include More Scenes from the Rural Life (Princeton Architectural Press), Making Hay, and The Last Fine Time. His book Timothy, or, Notes of an Abject Reptile, concerns the tortoise which the English eighteenth-century parson-naturalist Gilbert White inherited from his aunt, as described in his 1789 book The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne. In the first half of 2006, Klinkenborg posted a farm and garden blog about Rural Life, consisting of entries from the daily journal kept by Gilbert White in Selborne in 1784 and his own complementary daily entries. 

From 1997 to 2013, he was a member of The New York Times editorial board. Klinkenborg has published articles in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, Esquire, National Geographic, and Mother Jones magazines. He has written a series of editorial opinions in The New York Times, generally literary meditations on rural farm life. On December 26, 2013, he announced in that column that it would be the last he would write in that space.

From 2006 to 2007, he was a visiting writer-in-residence at Pomona College, where he taught nonfiction writing. In 2007, he received a Guggenheim fellowship, which funded his book The Mermaids of Lapland, about William Cobbett. In 2012, he published “Several Short Sentences About Writing.” He currently teaches creative writing at Yale University and lives on a small farm in Upstate New York.