Gregory McNamee

Gregory McNamee was born in then-West Germany, then under the watchful eye of the US military against the possibility of both renewed misbehavior and a Soviet invasion. As an Army brat, he led a peripatetic existence, though he always considered my mother’s native Northern Virginia to be home. He’s lived in Tucson, Arizona, since coming out for college in 1975, and while he has lived in Mexico and Italy, and traveled extensively throughout Europe and China as an adult, they’ll have to drag him out of the Sonoran Desert by his heels.

He earned a BA in classics and anthropology and an MA in English at the University of Arizona. Afterward he taught high school in Guadalajara, Mexico, before returning to Tucson to take a job in publishing, eventually becoming editor-in-chief of the University of Arizona Press.

In 1990, he went freelance, editing for many publishers and working as a journalist for various newspapers and magazines, including Outside, Newsday, and Kirkus Reviews. For the last he has been a contributing editor and contributing writer. He is also a contributing editor to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, specializing in world geography but also engaged in special projects in film, food and cooking, history, music, art, and politics.

His work has won numerous regional awards, and over a long career as a writer he has published 45 books and more than 10,000 periodical pieces to date, while as an editor he has been involved in the publication of more than 500 books.

The next adventure, he hopes, will involve the northern tier of the United States, with stops in Livingston, Montana; Medora, North Dakota, home of the soon-to-open Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library; and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, one of those bucket-list places. Onward!