Tovar’s lifelong curiosity about human relationships with the larger-than-human natural world has shaped both his life and his writing. It led him to become a hunter after a decade as a vegan. It led him to apprentice with a forester-logger. And it led him to graduate school, where he coined the phrase “adult-onset hunter” and researched Ojibwe and Euro-American hunting communities’ ways of talking about wolves.
He is the author of The Mindful Carnivore: A Vegetarian’s Hunt for Sustenance and is currently writing a book about wild foodways in America. His essays have appeared in The Atlantic, Aeon, High Country News, Northern Woodlands, Bugle, and elsewhere.
Tovar holds a PhD in communication from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and was an Aldo and Estella Leopold Writing Resident. He is a senior writer and social scientist at DJ Case + Associates.
Each summer, he drives to Cape Cod, where he and his Uncle Mark paddle a weathered aluminum canoe around harbors and bays in pursuit of fluke and black sea bass.
He lives in Vermont with his wife Catherine and an eclectic mix of cookbooks.