J.B. MacKinnon is the author or coauthor of four books of nonfiction. His latest, The Once and Future World, is a national bestseller in Canada and won the U.S. Green Prize for Sustainable Literature. Previous works are The 100-Mile Diet (with Alisa Smith), a bestseller widely recognized as a catalyst of the local foods movement; I Live Here (with Mia Kirshner and artists Michael Simons and Paul Shoebridge), a ‘paper documentary’ about displaced people; and Dead Man in Paradise, the story of a priest assassinated in the Dominican Republic, which won Canada’s highest prize for literary nonfiction.

As a freelance journalist, MacKinnon is currently a contributor to The New Yorker on consumer issues and ecology. His work also appears in publications ranging from National Geographic and Reader’s Digest to vanguard outlets such as Adbusters and Nautilus. He has won more than a dozen national and international writing awards in categories as varied as essays, science writing, and travelogue. MacKinnon is an adjunct professor at the University of British Columbia School of Journalism, Writing, and Media and regularly gives public lectures and writing workshops.