Nathaniel Philbrick, 48, is author of Sea of Glory: America’s Voyage of Discovery—The U.S. Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842, winner of the 2003 Theodore and Franklin D. Roosevelt Naval History Prize. His previous book, In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, won the 2000 National Book Award for nonfiction and spent forty weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Revenge of the Whale, an account of the Essex disaster for young readers, was named a 2003 Boston Globe-Horn Book honor book.

A former intercollegiate All-American sailor and North American Sunfish champion with degrees from Brown and Duke universities, Philbrick has also written extensively about competitive sailing and the history of his adopted home, Nantucket Island. His other books include The Passionate Sailor (1986); Yaahting, A Parody (1984), for which he was editor-in-chief; and Second Wind: A Sunfish Sailor’s Odyssey (1999); Away Off Shore: Nantucket Island and Its People (1994); and Abram’s Eyes: The Native American Legacy of Nantucket Island (1998). He has begun work on a new book about the voyage of the Mayflower and the settlement of Plymouth Colony.

Philbrick’s writing has appeared in Vanity Fair, the New York Times Book Review, the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, and Boston Globe. He has been on NBC Dateline, the Today Show, The Early Show, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, C-SPAN’s Booknotes with Brian Lamb, the History Channel, A&E’s Biography series, and National Public Radio. In 2001 the Kendall Whaling Museum presented him with the Byrne Waterman Award, and in 2002 he was named the Nathaniel Bowditch Maritime Scholar of the Year by the American Merchant Marine Museum. He is a fellow of the Nantucket Historical Association, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Society of American Historians. He is also the founding director of the Egan Institute of Maritime Studies on Nantucket Island, where he has lived with his wife and two children since 1986.