About Diane
The incandescent Diane Ackerman—celebrated interpreter of science and nature—is the author of two dozen highly acclaimed works of nonfiction and poetry, including The Zookeeper’s Wife and A Natural History of the Senses—books beloved by millions of readers all over the world. In prose so rich and evocative that one can feel the earth turning beneath one’s feet as one reads, Ackerman’s thrilling observations urge us to live in the moment, to wake up to nature’s everyday miracles.
Her forthcoming book, A Feast in Every Sense: The Marvel, Mystery and New Science of Our Senses (Random House, winter 2027), returns to the territory of her beloved classic with fresh discoveries about how we perceive and inhabit the world. Ackerman’s poetry collection The Planets: A Cosmic Pastoral has just been reissued with Marginalian Editions in 2026, with a foreward by Maria Popova.
The Human Age: The World Shaped By Us (Norton, 2014) won the PEN Henry David Thoreau Prize for literary excellence in nature writing, honoring a book that “celebrates the natural world and human ingenuity, while exploring how the human race has become the single dominant force of change on the whole planet.” It was also a New York Times bestseller and Notable Book of 2014.
The Zookeeper’s Wife (2008) tells the true story of Antonina and Jan Zabinski, Christian directors of the Warsaw Zoo during WWII, who saved over 300 doomed Jews by hiding them in the zoo cages. A New York Times bestseller for 54 weeks, it received the Orion Book Award and was adapted into a feature film starring Jessica Chastain in 2017.
One Hundred Names for Love was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Washington Post called it “an ode to playfulness and the brain’s plasticity…a testament to the power of creativity in language, life—and love.”
Other nonfiction titles include Dawn Light: Dancing with Cranes and Other Ways to Start the Day; An Alchemy of Mind, a poetics of the brain based on the latest neuroscience; Cultivating Delight: A Natural History of My Garden; Deep Play, which considers play, creativity, and our need for transcendence; A Slender Thread, about her work as a crisis line counselor; The Rarest of the Rare and The Moon by Whale Light, exploring endangered animals; A Natural History of Love; and On Extended Wings, her memoir of learning to fly.
Ackerman’s poetry has been published in leading literary journals. Her collections include I Praise My Destroyer; Origami Bridges: Poems of Psychoanalysis and Fire; I Praise My Destroyer; Jaguar of Sweet Laughter: New and Selected Poems; Lady Faustus; Reverse Thunder: A Dramatic Poem; and Wife of Light. She also writes nature books for children, including Animal Sense, Monk Seal Hideaway, and Bats: Shadows in the Night.
Her essays about nature and human nature have appeared in The New York Times, Smithsonian, Parade, The New Yorker, National Geographic, and many other journals. She hosted a five-hour PBS television series inspired by A Natural History of the Senses.
Diane Ackerman was born in Waukegan, Illinois. She received an MA, MFA, and PhD from Cornell University. Her many honors include the Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication (2022), election to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (2016), the PEN Henry David Thoreau Prize, the Orion Book Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the John Burroughs Nature Award, the Lavan Poetry Prize, and a D. Litt. She has been honored as a Literary Lion by the New York Public Library and has taught at many colleges and universities.