Hannah Nordhaus

Hannah Nordhaus is the bestselling author of American Ghost (HarperCollins, March 2015) and The Beekeeper’s Lament (HarperCollins, 2011).The Beekeeper’s Lament, a non-fiction portrait of a fourth-generation beekeeper amid the recent honey bee die-off, was a national bestseller and received critical acclaim from dozens of newspapers, magazines, and websites. The Associated Press praised the book as “a fascinating read from cover to cover.” Said the Boston Globe: “The Beekeeper’s Lament is at once science lesson, sociological study, and breezy read…. A book about bees could easily descend into academe, but the author settles for nothing less than literature.” The book, Hannah’s first, was a PEN Center USA Book Awards finalist, a Colorado Book Awards finalist, a National Federation of Press Women Book Award winner, and also appeared on a number of year-end “best of” lists.Her new book, American Ghost, tells the story of Hannah’s troubled great-great-grandmother, Julia Staab, who came to New Mexico as an imported German bride in 1866 and whose ghost is said to haunt an elegant hotel in Santa Fe. In the book, Hannah follows the path of Julia Staab’s life and ghost story from Europe through the American Southwest, meeting with historians and genealogists and psychics and ghost-hunters, rifling through archives and diaries and old newspapers, exploring the hazy boundary between history and myth, and learning some unexpected lessons along the way.Hannah’s writing has appeared in the Financial Times, Los Angeles Times, Outside Magazine, Times Literary Supplement (TLS), Ski Magazine, High Country News, The Village Voice, and many other publications. From 2007 to 2009, she was also outdoors columnist for the Denver Rocky Mountain News.Hannah has also received Associated Press and California Newspaper Publishing Association awards for feature writing and business reporting. In 2011, the literary magazine The Millions featured this interview with Hannah about the art and craft of writing book-length narrative nonfiction, calling it a “veritable how-to for writing a book of journalistic non-fiction.”She lives in Boulder, Colorado with her husband and two children.