Megan Kate Nelson

Megan Kate Nelson is a writer, historian, road cyclist, and cocktail enthusiast.

She is the author of The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West (Scribner, 2020), which was a finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in History.

Her new book, Saving Yellowstone: Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America, was published by Scribner on March 1, 2022, the 150th anniversary of the Yellowstone Act, which created the first national park in the world. Saving Yellowstone has won the 2023 Spur Award for Historical Nonfiction and is one of Smithsonian Magazine‘s Top Ten Books in History for 2022.

An expert in the history of the American Civil War, the U.S. West, and popular culture, Nelson has written articles about these topics for The New York Times, Washington Post, TIME, The Atlantic, Slate, and Smithsonian Magazine.

A fellow of the Society of American Historians, she is also a regular guest on radio shows and TV documentaries about western history and popular culture.

Before leaving academia to write full-time in 2014, Nelson taught U.S. history and American Studies at Texas Tech University, Cal State Fullerton, Harvard, and Brown. She earned her BA in History and Literature from Harvard University and her PhD in American Studies from the University of Iowa.