Porter Fox was born in New York and raised on the coast of Maine. He lives, writes, teaches, and edits the award-winning literary travel writing journal, Nowhere, (nowheremag.com). He graduated with an M.F.A. in fiction from The New School and teaches at Columbia University School of the Arts. His new book, THE LAST WINTER: The Scientists, Adventurers, Journeymen, and Mavericks Trying to Save the World was published by Little, Brown in 2021.
His fiction, essays, and nonfiction have been published in The New York Times Magazine, The Believer, Outside, Men's Journal, National Geographic Adventure, Powder, Salon.com, Narrative, The Literary Review, Northwest Review, Third Coast and Conjunctions, among others.
In 2013 he published DEEP: The Story of Skiing and the Future of Snow. The book was featured on the cover of the New York Times Sunday Review, CBS national news, NPR, and in both the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. Fox also presented findings in the book to heads of state and climate envoys from around the world at the 2015 Paris Agreement.
Fox has been anthologized in The Best American Travel Writing, nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and was a finalist for the 2009 Robert Olen Butler Fiction Prize. He won a Western Press Association “Maggie” for Best Series of Articles in 2014. He has written and edited scripts for Roger Corman and several documentary filmmakers. He recently completed his first collection of short stories and an anthology of short fiction with the late poet Larry Fagin.
He is a member of the Miss Rockaway Armada and Swimming Cities art collectives in New York and collaborated on installations on the Mississippi and Hudson Rivers, Venice Biennale (2009), Mass MoCA (2008) and New York City's Anonymous Gallery (2009).
At MacDowell in 2016, Fox completed Part II of his nonfiction book, Northland: A 4,000-Mile Journey Along America’s Forgotten Border, about travelling America's northern border from east to west. It was published by W.W. Norton in 2018. He won a Lowell Thomas Award for an excerpt from the book. He was a recipient of MacDowell’s Calderwood Foundation Art of Nonfiction Grant. In 2023, he finished the rough draft of his new book, The Great River of the Sea. He also edited and published a 5,000-word excerpt from the book in the New York Times Magazine from MacDowell.
