Craig Welch (www.craig-welch.com) has been a journalist for two decades and has been the environment reporter at The Seattle Times since 2000. His work has appeared in Smithsonian magazine, the Washington Post, and Newsweek. He has ridden with tribal fishermen hunting seals in Alaska, hitched helicopter rides with scientists in the melting Arctic, prowled the Oregon woods for endangered owls, and tracked the development of Wyoming's oil fields. He started his career in the Rocky Mountains, in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where he wrote about elk and grizzly bears and plans to return gray wolves to Yellowstone National Park. He has won numerous local, regional and national awards, and the national Society of Environmental Journalists twice named him Outstanding Beat Reporter of the Year, mostly recently in 2010. He spent an academic year as a fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. He lives with his family in Washington State. Shell Games, his first book, was a finalist for the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association award.