Author photo: M. Sushoreba
CRAIG CHILDS
CRAIG CHILDS has published more than a dozen critically acclaimed books, including Tracing Time: Seasons of Rock Art on the Colorado Plateau, The Secret Knowledge of Water, Atlas of a Lost World, Virga & Bone, Stone Desert Journal, and The Wild Dark: Finding the Night Sky in the Age of Light (Torrey House Press, May 2025). He is a contributing editor at Adventure Journal Quarterly and his work has appeared in the Atlantic, New York Times, and Los Angeles Times. He lives in southwest Colorado.
BEHIND THE BOOK
An Interview with Craig Childs about the making of THE WILD DARK (Coming soon!)
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BOOKS BY THE AUTHOR
STONE DESERT
Originally published over twenty-five years ago, Stone Desert brings the wonder and wildness of one of our nation’s most geologically and culturally unique national parks to readers everywhere. With a new introduction by the author, this edition includes Craig Childs’s original journal—written over a winter in Canyonlands National Park and complete with pen-and-ink sketches—from which Stone Desert originated. Join Childs as he hikes the high mesas, navigates the winding canyons, and witnesses the ancient rock art of Utah’s most inscrutable and remote slickrock desert.
VIRGA & BONE:
Essays from Dry Places
Writer and adventurer Craig Childs dwells upon desert icons—human, animal, and otherwise—in these contemplative and visceral essays.
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From the author of The Secret Knowledge of Water and Atlas of a Lost World comes a deeply felt essay collection focusing upon a vivid series of desert icons—a sheet of virga over Monument Valley, white seashells in dry desert sand, boulders impossibly balanced. Craig Childs delves into the primacy of the land and the profound nature of the more-than-human.
“A meditation on the beauty and value of the untouched corners of the Southwest.”
— CATALYST MAGAZINE
TRACING TIME:
Seasons of Rock Art on the Colorado Plateau
Craig Childs bears witness to rock art of the Colorado Plateau—bighorn sheep pecked behind boulders, tiny spirals in stone, human figures with upraised arms shifting with the desert light, each one a portal to the open mouth of time. With a spirit of generosity, humility, and love of the arid, intricate landscapes of the desert Southwest, Childs sets these ancient communications in context, inviting readers to look and listen deeply.
“In Tracing Time, Craig Childs invites us to join him on a journey to visit, experience, and try to understand the ancient rock writings scattered throughout the storied northern Southwest—a journey that includes many colorful components and even more colorful characters. This is not an investigation, in the typical and tiresome sense, but a meditation. Punctuated with reflections on Childs’s own experience and insights shared with him by descendant knowledge-keepers, Tracing Time is an engaging glimpse into a world both fascinating and fundamentally unknowable to those who aren’t born into it.”
—R. E. BURRILLO, author of Behind the Bears Ears
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THE WILD DARK:
Finding the Night Sky in the Age of Light
A night sky is not an absence of light; it is the presence of the universe. In The Wild Dark, master storyteller Craig Childs embarks on a quest to bike from the blinding lights of the Las Vegas Strip to one of the darkest spots in North America. Childs is a fearless explorer of both the natural world and the human imagination, making him the perfect guide to help us rediscover the heavens and to ask: “What does it do to us to not see the night sky?” In a book that is at once an adventure story, a field guide, and a celebration of wonder, Childs invites us to look up and to look inward, eyes wide and sparkling with stars.
“As ever, Childs weaves in urgent issues, from what artificial light does to birds, to night sky advocacy, to solutions for protecting the flickering stars that grace us. One leaves this gorgeous book filled with wonder, not only for stars, but for everything from tarantulas to archeoastronomy.”
—LAURA PRITCHETT, author of Playing with Wildfire