Apricot Irving is the author of The Gospel of Trees, a lyrical meditation on ecology, loss, and the tangled history of missions in Haiti, winner of the 2019 Sarah Winnemucca Award for Creative Nonfiction.

She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and Literary Arts Creative Nonfiction Fellowship. Her writing has appeared in Granta, On Being, Tin House, Oregon Humanities, Portland Monthly and Topic Magazine.

Raised a missionary’s daughter in Haiti, Irving has taught literature and writing to students in Indonesia, China, the U.S., the U.K., and Ireland. She reported on post-earthquake recovery efforts in the north of Haiti for the radio program This American Life and is the founder and director of the Boise Voices Oral History Project, a collaboration between youth and elders to record the stories of a rapidly changing neighborhood in N/NE Portland, which was honored at City Hall for civic engagement and innovative storytelling. Her reporting on the Eagle Creek Fire was selected for the 2019 anthology Best American Science & Nature Writing.

Photo credit: Tyler Merkel