While a student, she was involved in running a literary magazine, and upon graduation,[2] was accepted into a literature PhD program at the University of Pennsylvania.
[5] She quit teaching after a difficult pregnancy with her second child, and spent years freelance writing for various publications,[1] including Glamour, Guernica, Literary Hub, Oxford American, and River Teeth.
[9] Soon after, she was offered a weekly column, writing early pieces on the backyard drama of nesting birds[10] and the way the 2016 United States presidential election played out in her local neighborhood.
[18][19] While Renkl's formal education was mainly focused around poetry, she eventually settled on her current prose style, including some notably short micro-essays.
White, Annie Dillard, Mary Oliver, Wendell Berry, and James Agee among the writers who have influenced her work.
[21] Danny Heitman of The Wall Street Journal noted that Renkl's nature writing "seems like a belated answer to White.
Renkl grapples with the region's meaning, both in her work and for the canon as a whole, writing: People can hardly help loving the hands that rocked their cradles or the landscapes that shaped their souls, but I doubt there’s a single writer in the South for whom life here isn’t a source of deep ambivalence.
It has all made me wonder: What if being a Southern writer has nothing to do with rural tropes or lyrical prose or a lush landscape or humid heat so thick it’s hard to breathe?