Melissa Hart is the author of Wild Within: How Rescuing Owls Inspired a Family (Lyons, September 2014) and Gringa: A Contradictory Girlhood (Seal, 2009).  She’s a columnist at The Writer Magazine, and her articles and essays have appeared in The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Orion, High Country News, Hemispheres, Horizon Air Magazine, The Advocate, Adbusters, and numerous other publications.  She teaches at the School of Journalism and Communication, University of Oregon.  Melissa lives in Eugene with her husband and daughter

Wild Within: How Rescuing Owls Inspired a Family is author Melissa Hart’s story of how she learned to rehabilitate and train birds of prey at a local nature center while waiting to adopt a child from Oregon’s foster care system.  Through immersion in the natural world, Hart found herself transformed from newly-divorced Los Angeles urbanite to Pacific Northwest environmental educator enamored of a handsome photographer with a passion for owls, eagles, hawks, and falcons.  Together, they worked to care for injured and orphaned birds of prey, eventually embarking on a two-and-a-half year adventure to adopt their daughter.