[4] He is the editor in chief of Ecotone, the environmental journal he founded in 2004,[5] which has published the work of writers as diverse as Wendell Berry, Denis Johnson, Gerald Stern, Sherman Alexie, and Marvin Bell.
Gessner is the author of thirteen books of nonfiction,[6] including, most recently A Traveler's Guide to the End of the World,[7] All The Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner and the American West,[8] as well as the Ultimate Glory: Frisbee, Obsession, and My Wild Youth; the New York Times bestseller.
[17] In 1997, Gessner published A Wild, Rank Place, a short memoir about spending a year on Cape Cod and tending to his father, who was dying of cancer.
Since 2001, Gessner has published seven more books that combine memoir with humor and observations of the natural world, beginning with Return of the Osprey, in 2001.
Of Sick of Nature, renowned eco-critic Michael Branch wrote, "Gessner has positioned himself as a sort of Woody Allen of environmental writers" and "like Emerson, who observed that the dead forms of institutional practice must be revivified through radical acts of intellectual, aesthetic, and moral imagination, Gessner rails against the narrowness of environmental literature to open the field to new (if less earnest) approaches."
In Soaring with Fidel, released in April 2007, Gessner continued to push the nature genre, following the entire 7,000 mile migration of ospreys from New England to Cuba and Venezuela.