Hannah Nordhaus is a journalist and bestselling nonfiction author of The Beekeeper’s Lament and American Ghost. She writes about history, science and the natural world for National Geographic, Scientific American and many other publications. She was a 2019-2020 National Geographic Storytelling Fellow and is a Journalist in Residence at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Hannah’s first book, The Beekeeper’s Lament, released in 2011, is a non-fiction portrait of a fourth-generation beekeeper in the middle of a strange and sobering honey bee die-off. The Beekeeper’s Lament was a PEN Center USA Book Awards finalist, a Colorado Book Awards finalist, and a National Federation of Press Women Book Award winner.
Her second book, American Ghost, released in 2015, untangles the complicated legend of Hannah’s great-great-grandmother, Julia Staab, who traveled the Santa Fe Trail to New Mexico in 1866 as a mail-order bride. American Ghost was winner of the WILLA Literary Awards, the Seven Sisters Book Awards, NM-AZ Book Awards Finalist and was named to Entertainment Weekly’s and The Denver Post’s Best Books of 2015 lists. Both books were national bestsellers.
Hannah’s nonfiction journalism has appeared in National Geographic, Wired, Smithsonian, Scientific American, the Wall St. Journal, Financial Times, Outside, Times Literary Supplement (TLS), and many other publications, covering such subjects as contested public lands in the American West, besieged beekeepers in California, carrion beetles in Oklahoma, corn beetles in the American heartland, intrepid nuns on the western frontier, and dog-poop mappers in Colorado.
Hannah grew up in Washington D.C. She received degrees in American Studies and history from Yale University and the University of Colorado. She lives in Boulder, Colorado.