Apricot Irving is the author of The Gospel of Trees, an award-winning memoir on family, reforestation 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 a Literary Arts Creative Nonfiction Fellowship. Her writing has appeared in Granta, On Being, Oregon Humanities, Portland Monthly and Topic Magazine. Her reporting on the Eagle Creek Fire was selected for the 2019 anthology Best American Science & Nature Writing.

Raised in Haiti, Irving has taught literature and writing to students in Indonesia, 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 changing neighborhood in N/NE Portland, honored at City Hall for innovative storytelling. She mentors emerging writers in private workshops and offers 1:1 coaching, and is on the Creative Nonfiction Faculty at Pacific University’s MFA Program.

Photo credit: Edis Jurčys