JULIA ZARANKIN is a writer and self-proclaimed birdsplainer with a particular fondness for sewage lagoons. Her writing has appeared in The Walrus, Cottage Life, Orion Magazine, Threepenny Review, Antioch Review, Birding, Maisonneuve, The New Quarterly, ON Nature and The Globe & Mail. Zarankin is the winner of the Eden Mills Writers’ Festival prize for creative non-fiction and has been a finalist for the CBC Short Story Prize, first runner-up for PRISM International’s creative non-fiction prize, a finalist for the TNQ Edna Staebler Personal Essay Contest and twice longlisted for the CBC Nonfiction Prize.