Zachary Michael Jack has authored or edited more than a dozen award-winning books in a variety of genres, including poetry, fiction, essay, journalism, and environmental and agricultural history. His work has earned the Prentice Hall Prize, two nominations for a Pushcart Prize (Best of the Small Presses), and two nominations for the Theodore Saloutos Award for the year's best book on agricultural history.

Specializing in writing on place, sport, and the outdoors, Jack has edited the work of the foremost advocates of nature, place, and outdoor life, including Liberty Hyde Bailey, Wendell Berry, Aldo Leopold, John Muir, and "Uncle Henry" Wallace, among others, and the classic voices of sport literature, including Paul Gallico, Ernest Hemingway, Jack London, and George Plimpton.

His environmental and rural writings have earned praise from Bill McKibben and A. Carl Leopold, among others, and have been featured in the Chicago Tribune, the Des Moines Register, and on Chicago and Iowa Public Radio. Jack is especially invested in sharing with young adults the transformative power of place, efforts which resulted in his founding and directing of the Iowa School of Lost Arts, and the publication of a well-loved collection about his home state, Letters to a Young Iowan, endorsed by Iowa governors Robert Ray and Terry Branstad.

Jack is an advisory board member for the Interversity Place Studies listserv, a consulting editor for the Voices of the American Land book series, and a former writer-in-residence at New York's Blue Mountain Center, Ireland's Tyrone Guthrie Centre, and Mexico's Great River Arts Institute.

An assistant professor of English, Jack teaches courses in writing and rural and urban studies at North Central College. He is the great-grandson of pioneering soil conservation writer Walter Thomas Jack, and hails from the Iowa Heritage Farm and timber his family settled prior to the Civil War.

A former sports editor, Jack contributes to sports and outdoor magazines nationwide and is the editor, most recently of Farewell to Sport and Inside the Ropes: Sportswriters Get Their Game On, a volume which L. Jon Wertheim of Sports Illustrated calls "as rich acollection of writing-not just sportswriting, but writing writing, as one could hope to find."