On Keeping Our Hearts Open

Apricot Irving is the author of The Gospel of Trees, a lyrical meditation on ecology, loss, and the tangled history of missions in Haiti and winner of the 2019 Sarah Winnemucca Award for Creative Nonfiction. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and Literary Arts Creative Nonfiction Fellowship. Her writing has appeared in Granta, On Being, Tin House, Oregon Humanities, Portland Monthly, and Topic Magazine. Raised a missionary’s daughter in Haiti, Irving has taught literature and writing to students in Indonesia, China, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Ireland. She reported on postearthquake 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 rapidly changing neighborhood in north/northeast Portland, Oregon, which was honored at City Hall for civic engagement and innovative storytelling. She currently lives in the Columbia River Gorge with her partner and two wildly imaginative boys. Her reporting on the Eagle Creek Fire was selected for the 2019 anthology Best American Science and Nature Writing.