About the Author

Tom Zoellner is the author of nine nonfiction books, including Island on Fire: The Revolt that Ended Slavery in the British Empire, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for the best nonfiction book of 2020 and a finalist for the Bancroft Prize and the California Book Award. He works as a professor at Chapman University and Dartmouth College, and as an editor-at-large for the Los Angeles Review of Books.

His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Harper’s, The American Scholar, The Oxford American, Time, Foreign Policy, Men’s Health, Slate, Scientific American, Audubon, Sierra, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Texas Observer, The American Scholar, The Wall Street Journal and many other publications. Tom is a former staff writer for The Arizona Republic and the San Francisco Chronicle, and the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Lannan Foundation.