Steve Olson is author of the book Eruption: The Untold Story of Mount St. Helens, which Amazon has named one of the 20 best nonfiction books published in 2016 and which has been shortlisted for the Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature. He is also the author of Mapping Human History: Genes, Race, and Our Common Origins, which was nominated for the National Book Award, and other books, and he has written for the Atlantic Monthly, Science, the Smithsonian, and many other magazines. Since 1979, he has been a consultant writer for the National Academy of Sciences, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, and other national scientific organizations. A native of Washington State, he now lives in Seattle.