Ryan Devereaux

READING

Ryan Devereaux

Wheatgrass Books will host Ryan Devereaux, author of The Hunt, for a reading on Thursday, November 12th at 6 pm.

THE HUNT tells the extraordinary inside story of the deadliest wolf hunt in the history of Yellowstone National Park, in which a fifth of the park’s wolf population was decimated in the winter of 2021–2022, a drama of conservation, corruption, and centuries-old battles to decide the future of wild creatures and wild spaces in the American West.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ryan Devereaux is an award-winning journalist and Type Media Center fellow based in Tucson, Arizona, where he covers the intersections of politics, power, and justice in the American West. From 2013 to 2024, he was a senior investigative reporter at The Intercept, where he covered a range of topics from conservation and the environment, to immigration and the border, to the War on Terror and the drug war in Mexico. His work, alone and in collaboration with colleagues, has been recognized with a number of honors including an Edward R. Murrow award, the Deadline Club’s top prize for feature reporting, and an Online Journalism Award for best feature writing for a small newsroom.

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR THE HUNT

“If you want to understand politics in the American West, you’ve got to understand wolves. Ryan Devereaux’s The Hunt is a wonderful guide to both. Deeply researched, even-handed, and clearly written, it’s an indispensable resource for those trying to solve the Gordian knot of wildlife management in an age of political polarization. Highly recommended!” —Nate Blakeslee, New York Times bestselling author of American Wolf

“Ryan Devereaux has written a magnificently disturbing page-turner about the West’s most political animal and he draws an inescapable conclusion: no wild creature in America exposes the cold depths of human nature like the wolf.” —Dan Flores, New York Times bestselling author of Coyote America and Wild New World

“The Trump era is sad in so many ways, the antipathy to anything wild being one of the biggest. This book describes in deep detail, and with considerable temperance, how we’ve let the most selfish human instincts control far too much.” —Bill McKibben, author of Here Comes the Sun

“To decode the politics of the modern American West, read Ryan Devereaux’s exquisitely reported The Hunt, in which the story of a single season in Yellowstone becomes a story about us all.” —Michelle Nijhuis, author of Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction

“Epic in its scope and meticulous in its reporting, The Hunt is an enthralling, heart-rending account of the dark passions and venomous politics that swirl around Yellowstone’s storied wolves. With sensitivity and wisdom, Ryan Devereaux investigates the brutal, state-sanctioned persecution of these iconic animals—a tragedy that epitomizes the cultural wars that have long roiled the American West.” —Ben Goldfarb, award-winning author of Eager and Crossings

“Part true crime and part environmental jeremiad, Ryan Devereaux has written a history of the culture wars through the lens of a single species and the world’s first national park. His writing is gutsy, tactile, blood-on-snow. You won’t be disappointed.” —Jordan Fisher Smith, author of Engineering Eden: A Violent Death, a Federal Trial, and the Struggle to Restore Nature in Our National Parks

“The Hunt is a riveting tale that teaches us as much about the complexities of human society as it does about Canis lupus. The wolf, in Ryan Devereaux’s brilliant telling, is intimately entangled not only with American folklore, history, and ecology but with our increasingly polarized politics as well.” —Karl Jacoby, author of Shadows at Dawn