Gina Rae La Cerva is a geographer and environmental anthropologist. Her first book, Feasting Wild: In Search of the Last Untamed Food was recommended by the New York Times Summer Reading List and selected as a Best Nonfiction Book of 2020 by Amazon.
An avid adventurer, La Cerva has researched tsunamis in Indonesia, crossed the Pacific Ocean on a sailboat, and followed the wild meat trade from the rainforests of the Congo Basin to the streets of Paris.
Her love of being outside began in childhood, as she grew up exploring the mountains of northern New Mexico. She is dedicated to writing about environmental science and philosophy in ways that both personalize and contextualize dense academic research, broadening the scope of engagement with these subjects to scientists and non-scientists alike.
La Cerva holds degrees from Yale University, the University of Cambridge, and Vassar College. She is a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow and recipient of Yale’s William R. Burch Prize. She was a scholar in Residence for the U.S. Forest Service at Grey Towers and has held residencies at Djerassi Resident Artist Program, PLAYA at Summerlake, Yale Meyers Forest in Easton, CT, and at Bloedel Reserve on Bainbridge Island.
Her writing has been published in Emergence Magazine, Leonardo/ISAST (The International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology) by MIT Press, THE Magazine, Sage Magazine, Feedback: The Open Humanities Press, Vassar ScienceWorks, The Santa Fe Reporter, Gender and Forests: Climate Change, Tenure, Value Chains, and Emerging Issues (Routledge, 2016), and in Tropical Resources: The Bulletin of the Yale Tropical Resources Institute.
The extensive field research for her book was funded by numerous grants and awards, including the Edward C. Armbrecht Jr. Family Fund Award, Coca-Cola World Fund, IBS Small Grants Program, Tropical Resources Institute Endowment Fellowship, Council on Southeast Asia Studies Research Grant, Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies Scholarship, and the Carpenter-Sperry Research Fund.
