[1][2] He is the author of Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology[3] (2010) and The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World (1996), for which he received the Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction.

[11] Born in the suburbs of New York City, Abram began practicing sleight-of-hand magic during his high school years in Baldwin, Long Island; it was this craft that sparked his ongoing fascination with perception.

In 1976, he began working as "house magician" at Alice's Restaurant in the Berkshires of Massachusetts and soon was performing at clubs throughout New England[12] while studying at Wesleyan University.

After graduating summa cum laude from Wesleyan in 1980, Abram traveled throughout Southeast Asia as an itinerant magician, living and studying with traditional, indigenous magic practitioners (or medicine persons) in Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and Nepal.

Upon returning to North America he continued performing while devoting himself to the study of natural history and ethno-ecology, visiting and learning from native communities in the Southwest desert and the Pacific Northwest.

[14] Abram's writing is informed by his studies among indigenous peoples in Indonesia, Nepal, and the Americas, as well as by the American nature-writing tradition that stems from Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and Mary Austin.

[21] In 2006, Abram—together with biologist Stephan Harding, ecopsychologist Per Espen Stoknes, and environmental educator Per Ingvar Haukeland—founded the non-profit Alliance for Wild Ethics (AWE), for which he serves as Creative Director.

[24] A review in Orion by Potowatami elder Robin Wall Kimmerer described the book thus: "Prose as lush as a moss-draped rain forest and as luminous as a high desert night ...

Deeply resonant with Indigenous ways of knowing, Becoming Animal lets us listen in on wordless conversations with ancient boulders, walruses, birds, and roof beams.