2016 Henry David Thoreau Prize for Nature Writing

The 2016 Henry David Thoreau Prize for Nature Writing.

Chickasaw poet, novelist, essayist, and environmentalist Linda Hogan will receive the 2016 Henry David Thoreau Prize for Nature Writing. Free and open to the public (reservations recommended). More info and reservations HERE (http://www.pen-ne.org/event-details/2016/3/17/nature-speaks-linda-hogan-and-the-legacy-of-thoreau).

Thursday, March 10th, 6-7:30pm

MIT Room 2-190, 182 Memorial Drive, Cambridge

“There is a way that nature speaks, that land speaks. Most of the time we are simply not patient enough, quiet enough, to pay attention to the story.” - Linda Hogan

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Linda Hogan is the author of numerous books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, most recently Dark / Sweet - New and Selected Poems.

Intimately connected to her political and spiritual concerns, Hogan’s work deals with issues such as the environment and eco-feminism, the relocation of Native Americans, and historical narratives, including oral histories. Hogan has received grants from the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation, and her awards include a Lannan Literary Award, an American Book Award, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas. William Kittredge, in his introduction to Hogan’s Rounding the Human Corners, noted, “poets like Linda, through their language, open for us a doorway into their specific resonating dream of the electric universe.”

Other Linda Hogan poetry collections include: Calling Myself Home (1978); Daughters, I Love You (1981); Eclipse (1983); Seeing Through the Sun (1985), which won the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation; Savings (1988), The Book of Medicines, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist (1993); and Rounding the Human Corners (2008).

Hogan’s collections of prose also reflect her interests in the environment and Native American culture. Her publications in prose include: Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World (1995), The Woman Who Watches Over the World: A Native Memoir (2001), and, with Brenda Peterson, Sighting: The Gray Whales’ Mysterious Journey (2002). Her novels include Mean Spirit (1990), Solar Storms(1995), Power (1998), and People of the Whale: A Novel (2008). Together with Brenda Peterson, she also edited the anthology The Sweet Breathing of Plants: Women and the Green World (2001). A recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation for her fiction,

Active as an educator and speaker, Hogan taught at the University of Colorado and at the Indigenous Education Institute. She has been a speaker at the United Nations Forum and was a plenary speaker at the Environmental Literature Conference in Turkey in 2009.

Hogan’s awards include a Lannan Literary Award, the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Spirit of the West Literary Achievement Award, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas.

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The Henry David Thoreau Prize was established in 2010 by writer and naturalist Dale Peterson, and is awarded annually to a writer demonstrating literary excellence in nature writing. Previous winners are Gretel Ehrlich, E. O. Wilson, Gary Snyder, Peter Matthiessen, and T. C. Boyle.