Philip Connors was born in Ames, Iowa, and grew up on a farm in southern Minnesota. After seeing his family forced off the land during the farm crisis of the 1980s, he went to college and received a B.A. in print journalism from the University of Montana, graduating as print journalism was entering its own period of crisis. He worked for several years at the Wall Street Journal, mostly as an editor on the Leisure & Arts page. In 2002 he left New York for a job as a wilderness fire lookout in New Mexico's Gila National Forest, where he has spent every summer since. That experience became the subject of his first book, Fire Season: Field Notes From a Wilderness Lookout, published by Ecco in 2011. It was named the best nature book of the year by Amazon.com and won a National Outdoor Book Award, the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award, the Reading the West Award for nonfiction, and the grand prize from the Banff Mountain Book Competition. He lives in southwest New Mexico.