About
Photo by JT Thomas.
I live in a small town in western Colorado, between the foothills of the Rockies and the redrock canyons of southeastern Utah. (If you're wondering about my last name, it's pronounced "Nye-house.") A lapsed biologist, I specialize in long-form stories about conservation and global change, but I've covered subjects ranging from border security to wrestling. In 2011, as an Alicia Patterson Foundation fellow, I reported on radical measures to conserve critically endangered species.
I'm proud to be a longtime contributing editor of High Country News, a scrappy institution that produces some of the finest journalism in the American West, and a contributing writer for Smithsonian. My work has also appeared in National Geographic, The Atlantic, The New York Times, Orion, Audubon, Parade, and The Christian Science Monitor, and my commentaries have aired on NPR's All Things Considered.
On Alaska's Juneau Icefield. Photo by Jeff Barbee.
My reporting on science and the environment has won several national journalism honors, including the Walter Sullivan Award for Excellence in Science Journalism, an AAAS Science Journalism Award, the Media Award from the American Institute of Biological Sciences, four awards from the American Society of Journalists and Authors, and a finalist nod for the National Academies Communication Award. My writing has also been included in the anthologies Best American Science Writing and Best American Science and Nature Writing.
My reporting trips take me throughout the western United States, northern Mexico and beyond, and my research has been supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
I'm aided in many tangible and intangible ways by my husband Jackson Perrin -- teacher, carpenter, and scrounger extraordinaire -- who built both our house and my office out of straw bales, and installed the panels that keep my writing solar-powered. Our daughter, born in September 2008, keeps everything in perspective.
