Marnie Reed Crowell grew up in Haddonfield, New Jersey and majored in Latin and biology at Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg, Virginia. After receiving her Master's degree in Biology from University of Pennsylvania in 1962, Marnie married ecologist Kenneth L. Crowell. With their two sons, David and Tom, the Crowells traveled and studied in such interesting places as East Africa, Scotland, China, the West Indies, and Oxford, England.
The family spent winters in Canton, New York on a hundred-acre farm near St. Lawrence University, and summered on Deer Isle in Maine, where Marnie wrote and painted and Ken did biogeographical research on island mouse populations.
As an independent radio producer, Marnie hosted WSLU-FM’s storytelling festival series which twice won NPR’s prestigious satellite distribution award. Her books include Greener Pastures (Funk& Wagnalls), Great Blue, Odyssey of a Heron (Times Books), Flycasting for Everyone (Stackpole, with Gary Lewis), North to the St.Lawrence (Raquette Press) and several Quick Key nature guides for Deer Isle. Her natural history-oriented articles have appeared in Readers Digest, Redbook, Natural History, and Audubon.
Long active in the Nature Conservancy and Island Heritage Trust, Marnie says "I keep writing because the arts speak for the environment and the environment is the lamp in which the miracle of life glows."
Click here to see some of Marnie's solo work.