Alumnus Steven Rinella, TV Host and Author, to Speak Oct. 4

MCC alumnus Steven Rinella, the popular, globe-trotting TV personality, hunter and award-winning author, will be in Muskegon at the Reeths-Puffer Rocket Centre on Thursday evening, Oct. 4, to read from his works, answer questions from the audience, and sign autographs.

Appearing as part of the Muskegon Writers’ Center Club series, Rinella will begin his talk at 7 p.m. The Muskegon-based band, Skee-Town Stylee, will perform from 6-7 p.m. Tickets are $5 and can be purchased at the door.

A native of Twin Lake, Mich., Rinella wrote American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon, which was the winner of the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award, and the Scavenger’s Guide to Haute Cuisine. The Minneapolis Star Tribune called Rinella “an engaging, sharp-eyed writer whose style fuses those of John McPhee and Hunter S. Thompson.”

His writing has also appeared in many publications, including Outside, Field and Stream, the New Yorker, Glamour, the New York Times, Men’s Journal, Salon.com, O the Oprah Magazine, Bowhunter, and the annual anthologies Best American Travel Writing and Best Food Writing.

Rinella hosts the television show MeatEater on the Sportsman Channel and previously hosted the Travel Channel’s The Wild Within.

Meat Eater chronicles Rinella’s lifelong relationship with nature and hunting through the lens of 10 hunts, beginning when he trapped muskrat commercially as a youngster.  He tells of his struggling career as a fur trapper, of a dalliance with catch-and-release steelhead fishing, of canoeing in the Missouri Breaks in search of mule deer, and of hunting the elusive Dall sheep in the glaciated mountains of Alaska. 

Through each story, Rinella, grapples with themes such as the role of the hunter in shaping American, the vanishing frontier, the responsibilities that human predators have to their prey, and the disappearance of the hunter himself as Americans lose their connection with the way their food finds its way to their tables.

After graduating in 1994 from MCC, Rinella earned a bachelor’s degree at Grand Valley State University and a Master of Fine Arts in 2000 from the University of Montana-Missoula. He now resides in Brooklyn, N.Y.

For more information on Rinella’s talk, contact Mary Tyler, chair of the Muskegon Writers’ Center, at (231) 777-0327.