Nancy Pick

Nancy Elizabeth Pick is an American journalist and author of nonfiction books.

Pick is a 1983 graduate of Amherst College, and the daughter of an Amherst alumnus.¹ After graduating Phi Beta Kappa and teaching English at the University of Dijon in France, in 1984 she became assistant editor of the Winchester Star in Winchester, Massachusetts.² She has also worked as a reporter for the Baltimore Evening Sun,³ and as a staff writer for the Harvard Museum of Natural History.⁴

Pick's books include:

• The Rarest of the Rare: Stories Behind the Treasures at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, with photographs by Mark Sloan, HarperCollins, 2004.⁵
• Curious Footprints: Professor Hitchcock's Dinosaur Tracks & Other Natural History Treasures at Amherst College, Amherst College Press, 2006.⁶
• Skuggorna vi bär : Stig Dagerman möter Etta Federn i Paris 1947 / Les Ombres de Stig Dagerman / The Writer and the Refugee, written with Lo Dagerman, Sweden: Norstedts, 2017; France: Maurice Nadeau, 2018.⁷
• Eye Mind Heart: A View of Amherst College at 200, Amherst College Press, 2021.¹³
• Do Plants Know Math? Unwinding the Story of Plant Spirals, from Leonardo Da Vinci to Now, written with Stéphane Douady, Jacques Dumais, and Christophe Golé, Princeton University Press, 2024;⁸ winner of the 2026 Euler Book Prize.⁹

She has also translated Robert Karjel's thriller novel The Swede from Swedish into English with Karjel.¹⁰

Pick lives in Sunderland, Massachusetts with her husband, Amherst College law professor Lawrence Douglas; they have two sons.¹¹¹ They married in Chicago in 1991.¹²