Colette Brooks is the author of three books of creative nonfiction: In the City: Random Acts of Awareness (Norton),  Lost in Wonder: Imagining science and other mysteries ( Counterpoint), and her latest book, Trapped in the Present Tense:  meditations on American Memory ( Counterpoint, January 2022).

In the City won the PEN/Jerard Fund award for distinguished nonfiction and Lost in Wonder was a finalist/honorable mention in the Grub Street National Book Prize in Nonfiction.

Her essays have appeared in The Georgia Review, The New York Times, The New Republic, Partisan Review, Southwest Review, Hotel Amerika,  and Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art,  among others.

She was born in Seattle and currently lives in New York City.