Barret Baumgart’s first book, China Lake, described by Richard Preston as “An apocalypse of the weird,” won the 2016 Iowa Prize for Literary Nonfiction. His second book, Yuck, about the Joshua Tree, Yucca Brevifolia, won the 2023 Wandering Aengus Book Award and is forthcoming from Wandering Aengus spring 2025. His essays and stories have appeared in the Paris Review, the Gettysburg Review, Vice, LitHub, Guernica, the Seneca Review, and Literary Review, among others. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.