To read Barry Lopez is to commune with a deep thinker. His writings have frequently been compared to those of Henry David Thoreau, as he brings a depth of erudition to the text by immersing himself in his surroundings, deftly integrating his environmental and humanitarian concerns. In his non fiction, he often examines the relationship between human culture and physical landscape. In his fiction, he frequently addresses issues of intimacy, ethics, and identity.

Barry Lopez is best known as the author of Arctic Dreams, for which he received the National Book Award. Among his other non fiction books are About This Life, and Of Wolves and Men, which was a National Book Award finalist. He is also the author of several award-winning works of fiction, including Field Notes, Winter Count, and a novella-length fable, Crow and Weasel. His recent work includes Light Action in the Caribbean, a collection of stories, and Resistance (2004), a book of interrelated stories—Lopez’s eloquent response to the recent ideological changes in American society. He selected and introduced a collection of essays, The Future of Nature, and he is the co-editor with Debra Gwartney of Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape, a landmark work of language, geography, and folklore. He is currently working on a new book, tentatively titled Horizon.

Once a landscape photographer, Barry Lopez continues to maintain close contact with a diverse community of artists. He is on the advisory board of Theater Grottesco in Santa Fe. He has collaborated with composer John Luther Adams on several concert and theater productions and spoken at openings for sculptor Michael Singer and photographer Robert Adams. In another arena of work, he recently collaborated with E. O. Wilson in the design of a university curriculum that combines the sciences and humanities in a new undergraduate major.

Barry Lopez has received numerous awards and prizes, among them the Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the John Burroughs Medal, Guggenheim, National Science Foundation, and Lannan Fellowships, and the John Hay Medal, as well as Pushcart Prizes in fiction and non fiction. He is a regular contributor to Granta, The Paris Review, Orion, Manoa, Outside, The Georgia Review, Harper’s, and other periodicals; he has also just been named as one of four “contributing writers” to National Geographic magazine.

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“Arguably the nation’s premier nature writer.”

— San Francisco Chronicle

“Mr. Lopez’s tone is intimate, inviting, as if his words shared the air with the snap and hiss of a campfire.”

—The New York Times Book Review