I teach courses on the built environment at the University of Michigan.

I’ve also had roughly five-year stints as a public radio journalist, a legislative PR/policy person, a grad student, and a grantmaker at a foundation. One theme has run steadily through these different jobs and professions: trying to understand places—how and why they work the way they do—whether it's a sprawling metro Detroit or a rustic Appalachian Trail.

I began working on The Appalachian Trail: A Biography shortly after I started teaching at Michigan full-time in 2010. (If you're expecting more than 288 pages from ten years of work, I hear you.) But for most of that time, it was a pretty nebulous idea. I hadn't written a book before, didn't know whether it would find a publisher, and so was always caught between a genuine commitment to the project and a fair amount of uncertainty about where it was headed. Once Houghton Mifflin Harcourt acquired the book and set a deadline, things moved pretty quickly.

I'm married and live in Ann Arbor; we have two grown kids.

Email: philip.danieri[at]gmail.com