National Book Award winner Barry Lopez to speak in September

            National Book Award winner and bestselling author Barry Lopez will be the featured guest at an event hosted Sept. 30 by Prairie Schooner, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's international literary journal.

            The event will be at 7:30 p.m. in the Nebraska Union ballroom, 14th and R streets, and is free and open to the public. Lopez will read from his creative work, followed by an on-stage interview with award-winning Nebraska author Mary Pipher and a book signing.

            Lopez is one of the foremost American voices in contemporary environmental literature and activism. His nonfiction book, "Arctic Dreams" (Vintage), won the National Book Award in 1986. He also holds a Guggenheim fellowship and five National Science Foundation fellowships, in addition to numerous Pushcart Prizes in both fiction and nonfiction,. His creative essay, "Six Thousand Pieces," will appear in Prairie Schooner's Fall 2013 issue.

            "I have found in Lopez that most reassuring combination of scholar, social commentator and generous human being," said Kwame Dawes, Prairie Schooner editor-in-chief. "He has been willing enough to contain these qualities within a profoundly empathic quality of affirmation for the human condition -- one that is refreshingly and self-reflexively critical and yet one that has the capacity to be celebratory and hopeful. It is a tremendous honor that he has agreed to come to Lincoln."

            This event has been made possible with the generous support of the College of Arts and Sciences, the School of Natural Resources, the School of Biological Sciences, the Institute for Ethnic Studies, the Center for Great Plains Studies, the University of Nebraska State Museum, the Nature Conservancy, the Environmental Studies Program, the Department of English, the Geography Program (School of Natural Resources), the Department of Philosophy, and the Department of Anthropology.

            Tom Lynch, associate professor of English at UNL, was influential in initiating the collaborative effort to host Lopez's reading. Lynch described the contemporary and lasting importance of Lopez within the humanities curriculum.

            "I consider Barry Lopez to be the most important environmental writer of his generation, a generation in which the genre has thrived in no small part due to his influence," Lynch said. "Lopez's exploration of the intersections of human consciousness, human cultures, and the wider natural world in which they are embedded has been profoundly influential. In an era when human damage to our planet has become ever more depressingly obvious, few writers make us think more deeply about our moral obligations to the natural world and to the beings we share it with."

            Lopez's major works include the nonfiction book "Of Wolves and Men" (Scribner), a National Book Award finalist, and the story collection "Resistance" (Vintage), winner of the 2004 Oregon Book Award. His writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Harper's, National Geographic and The Paris Review among others.

            For more information, visit http://prairieschooner.unl.edu.

Writer: Ryan Oberhelman