Susie P. Gonzalez

210-999-8406

susie.gonzalez@trinity.edu

Award-Winning Nature Writer to Speak at Trinity University

Jan. 28, 2003 – Barry Lopez, a best-selling and award-winning author of stories about nature, will read from and discuss his work at Trinity University’s Stieren Theater at 7:30 p.m. Monday, Feb. 24. Mr. Lopez will be in San Antonio to celebrate the revival of the Trinity University Press and its contract with him to publish, Home Ground: A Literary Glossary of the Landscape and Language. A reception and book signing will follow his presentation. The event is free and open to the public.  The author of more than a dozen books, including Of Wolves and Men, About This Life, and most recently the fiction collection Light Action in the Caribbean, Mr. Lopez has won acclaim for both fiction and nonfiction.  He received the National Book Award for Arctic Dreams. In his nonfiction, he writes often about the relationship between the physical landscape and human culture, and his work in that genre draws from anthropology, philosophy, natural history, history, and geography to illuminate urgent questions about our place in the world. In his fiction, he frequently addresses issues of intimacy, ethics, and identity.  “My purpose,” Mr. Lopez says, “is to clarify the possibilities for human life. To say, ‘Yes, we do live in an ambivalent human world, but it is possible to choose to lean into the light.’”  Mr. Lopez is widely celebrated for approaching his subjects with a passionate intellect and for infusing his prose with a strong moral voice, spellbinding clarity, and poetic depth. The New York Times critic Sarah Wheeler recently wrote that “next to Lopez and a handful of other writers struggling to find meaning in a world gone wrong, the rest of us seem like pale shadows.”  The San Francisco Chronicle said Mr. Lopez’s work places him “among the greatest twentieth-century American nature writers.” In Home Ground, which is both a literary celebration of our geographical heritage and a reference work, Mr. Lopez will define 800 words like “monadnock,” “yazoo,” “flatiron,” “birdfoot delta,” “arroyo,” and “tombolo.”  Forty writers from across the country — including Bill McKibben, Pattiann Rogers, Tobias Wolff, Robert Hass, Terry Tempest Williams, Alberto Rios, and Joy Williams – will contribute definitions of these landforms in concise, elegant prose.   Barbara Ras, director of Trinity University Press, who worked with Mr. Lopez on his New York Times bestseller Crow and Weasel, says, “Home Ground will bring together a community of literary writers to create a gift to the American people. Nothing remotely like it exists.  The book will offer an accurate, nuanced language to describe and honor the richness of our landscape.  It’s a book with a truly democratic purpose. Trinity University Press is privileged to be connected with such a magnificent project.” Mr. Lopez contributes regularly to Harper’s, The Georgia Review, The Paris Review, Outside, and other publications.  He has received the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the John Hay Medal, Guggenheim and National Science Foundation fellowships, a Lannan Foundation Award, and other honors. Born in 1945 in Port Chester, N.Y., Mr. Lopez grew up in southern California and New York City and attended the University of Notre Dame.  He travels widely and recent trips were to Argentina, Cuba, France, and Antarctica.  Since 1970, he has lived on the McKenzie River in western Oregon. “An Evening with Barry Lopez” is co-sponsored by the Trinity University Press, the Stieren Arts Enrichment Program, the Lecturers and Visiting Scholars Committee, the offices of the Trinity president and academic affairs, the urban studies and international programs, and the departments of history, biology, English, Geosciences, political science, religion, philosophy, sociology and anthropology, communication, physics and astronomy. For more information, contact the Trinity University Press at (210) 999-8880.

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Last updated on February 13, 2003 by the Office of Public Relations