Skip to main content

Porter Fox

Porter Fox’s book Northland: A 4,000-Mile Journey Along America’s Forgotten Border (Norton, 2018) was named one of Amazon’s 2018 Books of the Year. His fiction, essays, and nonfiction have been published in the New York Times Magazine, the Believer, Outside, Narrative Magazine, the Literary Review, and Third Coast, among others. His work has been anthologized in The Best American Travel Writing, and he was a finalist for the 2009 Robert Olen Butler Fiction Prize. He was a 2016 MacDowell Colony fellow and a recipient of MacDowell’s Calderwood Foundation Art of Nonfiction Grant. He teaches at Columbia University’s School of the Arts.

Author

Photograph by Sara Fox

The North Woods

Fall 2019 | Essays

 1I used to dream about the dark. I was usually in the woods in the dream. There was an animal nearby, the dim reflection of lake water pushing through the branches.This night was similar: dark sky, blackened pines, pinprick stars. The only ligh [...]