Jan DeBlieu is an American writer whose work often focuses on how people are shaped by the landscapes in which they live. Her own writing has been influenced by her adopted home in the Outer Banks of North Carolina.
She is the author of four books including Hatteras Journal, Meant to Be Wild, Wind (which won the John Burroughs Medal for Distinguished Natural History Writing, the highest national honor for that genre) and Year of the Comets (which was excerpted in the Washington Post). She also has written for Smithsonian, The New York Times Magazine, Audubon, and Orion.
In 2003 she was named the Cape Hatteras Coastkeeper for the North Carolina Coastal Federation, a post which she holds to this day. She has used her love of landscape to form unusual partnerships in which liberals and conservatives work in concert to restore the natural landscape.
In addition to her books she has published dozens of articles and essays in national magazines and journals. Her work has been widely anthologized.
In 2006, she was featured in the book Bedrock: Writers on the Wonders of Geology edited by Lauret E. Savoy, Eldridge M. Moores, and Judith E. Moores (Trinity University Press) which looks at how writing pays a tribute to the Earth's geological features.