Donovan Hohn

Biography

Donovan Hohn is the author of The Inner Coast: Essays (Norton, 2020) and Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea (Viking, 2011), a New York Times Notable Book and runner-up for the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction and the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. He is acting editor of Lapham’s Quarterly.

Donovan Hohn headshot.

See Work

ESSAYS / Summer 2025

Cicada Years

By Donovan Hohn ,  Illustration by Daniel Baxter

Periodical cicadas do not rely on camouflage to survive. They overwhelm their predators with numbers, billions of them crawling out of dime-size holes in the ground, an evolutionary strategy known among biologists as “predator satiation.”

Map of Plymouth, Massachusetts, covered in drawings of cicadas with big, red eyes by Daniel Baxter.
REPORTING / Spring 2018

Revival of the Ice Canoe

By Donovan Hohn ,  Photography by Johan Hallberg-Campbell

Into the Lost History and Wild Delights of a Quebecois Sport

Photograph by Johan Hallberg-Campbell