Megan Kate Nelson is a historian and writer. She has a PhD in American Studies from the University of Iowa. She has taught at Texas Tech University, Cal State Fullerton, Harvard, and Brown. She is the author of Saving Yellowstone: Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America, which won the 2023 Spur Award for Best Western Historical Nonfiction Book, and The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West, which was a 2021 Pulitzer Prize finalist in History. Her writing has also appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Smithsonian magazine.