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Steven Rinella            

Author; Journalist; TV Host, "MeatEater", Former Host of "The Wild Within" on Travel Channel

Steven Rinella is an avid outdoorsman, writer, and television host best known for his ability to translate the hunting lifestyle to a wide variety of audiences. He is the author of "The Scavenger's Guide to Haute Cuisine" (Miramax Books, 2005) and "American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon" (Random House, 2008). The latter title, which chronicles his buffalo hunt in the wilds of Alaska's Wrangell Mountains, won a number of awards including the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award and the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award. It was also chosen by Amazon.com as a Book of the Month selection and by the San Francisco Chronicle as one of the best 50 non-fiction books of 2008.

While Rinella's writing has appeared in a wide variety of popular publications, including Glamour, Men’s Journal, Outside, New Yorker, the New York Times, Salon.com, and O the Oprah Magazine, he has also written widely for traditional hunting and fishing publications such as Field and Stream, Fly Fisherman, Bowhunter, and the National Rifle Association's American Hunter online.

Currently, he is on the editorial staff of Petersen's Hunting, where he writes a monthly column. His magazine stories have been collected in the annual anthologies "Best American Travel Writing" (2003 and 2010) and "Best Food Writing" (2005). He has appeared a number of times on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered," where he discussed his hunting adventures, and has also been interviewed about hunting on such mainstream news outlets as CNN's "American Morning" and the Sunday broadcast of "Fox and Friends." In 2011, Rinella hosted "The Wild Within" on Travel Channel. His new show, "MeatEater," premiered on Sportsman Channel in 2012.

His third book, "Meat Eater: Adventures from the Life of an American Hunter," about his experiences as a lifelong outdoorsman, was published in the fall of 2012 by Spiegel and Grau.

Steven was born in Twin Lake, Michigan, and has lived in Montana, Wyoming, and Alaska. He currently resides in New York and maintains a moldy hunting and fishing shack in southeast Alaska.

Speech Topics


The Ethics of Hunting

Since Biblical times, humans have debated the necessity and moral implications of the hunting lifestyle. Today, that debate still rages in American culture. But while some argue that hunting is an anachronistic throwback to our barbaric past, others claim that hunting is a form of environmental enlightenment that fosters a strong conservation ethic and a love of the land. Lifelong hunter Steven Rinella is able to frame and inform that debate in an honest, open style, offering insights that will challenge everyone's assumptions -- be they hunter or anti-hunter.

American Buffalo: The Rise and Fall (and Rise Again) of an American Icon

The American buffalo, or bison, is the perfect example of an interdisciplinary subject that can be made readily applicable to just about every conscientious American's life. A proper understanding of this great beast's history requires tidbits of knowledge on such wide- ranging subjects as anthropology,paleontology, pop music, philanthropy, Nineteenth century politics, paleoecology, the layout of New York City, ballistics, genetics, American cinema, political correctness, and something called horn-core morphology. From its arrival in the New World to its near extirpation and its unlikely salvation, Steven Rinella explains the saga of the American buffalo with a style that critics have likened to a cross between John McPhee and Hunter S. Thompson.

Hunting for Food: An Ancient Path through Modern Life

Through visceral personal stories drawn from thirty years as a modern-day hunter- gatherer, Steven Rinella discusses the logistical, legal and physical challenges of procuring one’s entire intake of meat from the wild. Rinella has hunted and fished for literally hundreds of species of North American wild game, and the tales of his culinary adventures are inspiring, eye-opening, and sometimes shocking.

Meat Eater: Adventures from the Life of an American Hunter

Steven Rinella chronicles his lifelong relationship with nature and hunting through the lens of several hunts, beginning when he was an aspiring mountain man at age ten and ending as a thirty-seven-year-old Brooklyn father who hunts in the remotest corners of North America, feeding his family from the food he hunts. He tells of having a struggling career as a fur trapper just as fur prices were falling; of a dalliance with catch-and-release steelhead fishing; of canoeing in the Missouri Breaks in search of mule deer just as the Missouri River was freezing up one November; and of hunting the elusive Dall sheep in the glaciated mountains of Alaska. Through each story, Steven grapples with themes such as the role of the hunter in shaping America, the vanishing frontier, the ethics of killing, the allure of hunting trophies, the responsibilities that human predators have to their prey, and the disappearance of the hunter himself as Americans lose their connection with the way their food finds its way to their tables. Hunting, he argues, is intimately connected with our humanity; assuming responsibility for acquiring the meat that we eat, rather than entrusting it to proxy executioners, processors, packagers, and distributors, is one of the most respectful and exhilarating things a meat eater can do. A thrilling storyteller with boundless interesting facts and historical information about the land, the natural world, and the history of hunting, Steven paints a loving portrait of a way of life that is part of who we are as humans and as Americans.

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