About Michelle Dowd

Michelle Dowd is a journalism professor and contributor to The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, TIME magazine, Alpinist, and other national publications. She was raised on a mountain in the Angeles National Forest where she learned to identify flora and fauna, navigate by the stars, forage for edible plants, and care for the earth. Her memoir, Forager: Field Notes on Surviving a Family Cult, showcases her life growing up on an isolated mountain in California as part of an apocalyptic cult, and how she found her way out of poverty and illness by drawing on the gifts of the wilderness.