Richard Panek is most recently the author of The Trouble with Gravity: Solving the Mystery Beneath Our Feet. His previous books include The 4% Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality, which received the 2012 Science Communication Award from the American Institute of Physics. Among his numerous other honors: a Guggenheim fellowship in Science Writing, an Antarctic Artists and Writers grant from the National Science Foundation, and a fellowship in Literary Nonfiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts. His collaboration with Temple Grandin, The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum, was a New York Times best-seller and the recipient of the Goodreads Choice Award for Best Nonfiction Book of 2013. Richard’s own books have been translated into sixteen languages.

His essays and features have appeared in the New York Times, Discover, Esquire, Natural History (including a monthly column), Nature, Scientific American, Smithsonian, and the Washington Post. Richard is a longtime faculty member in the Goddard College MFA Writing Program as well as at Johns Hopkins University, where he teaches a course he developed at the invitation of the Writing Seminars, “Science and Storytelling.”