Edward Osborne Wilson was an American biologist, naturalist, ecologist, and entomologist known for developing the field of sociobiology.
Barry Holstun Lopez was an American author, essayist, nature writer, and fiction writer whose work is known for its humanitarian and environmental concerns. In a career spanning over 50 years, he visited more than 80 countries, and wrote extensively about a variety of landscapes including the Arctic wilderness, exploring the relationship between human cultures and nature. He won the National Book Award for Nonfiction for Arctic Dreams (1986) and his Of Wolves and Men (1978) was a National Book Award finalist. He was a contributor to magazines including Harper's Magazine, National Geographic, and The Paris Review.
Jared Mason Diamond is an American scientist, historian, and author. In 1985 he received a MacArthur Genius Grant, and he has written hundreds of scientific and popular articles and books. His best known is Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), which received multiple awards including the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction. In 2005, Diamond was ranked ninth on a poll by Prospect and Foreign Policy of the world's top 100 public intellectuals.
Eavan Aisling Boland was an Irish poet, author, and professor. She was a professor at Stanford University, where she had taught from 1996. Her work deals with the Irish national identity, and the role of women in Irish history. A number of poems from Boland's poetry career are studied by Irish students who take the Leaving Certificate. She was a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry.
Carolyn Forché is an American poet, editor, professor, translator, and human rights advocate. She has received many awards for her literary work.
John Edgar Wideman is an American novelist, short story writer, memoirist, and essayist. He was the first person to win the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction twice. His writing is known for experimental techniques and a focus on the African-American experience.
George Saunders is an American writer of short stories, essays, novellas, children's books, and novels. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, McSweeney's, and GQ. He also contributed a weekly column, "American Psyche", to The Guardian's weekend magazine between 2006 and 2008.
Doug Peacock is an American author, filmmaker, wildlife activist, and Vietnam War veteran. He is best known for his work dedicated to grizzly bear recovery in the lower-48, his book Grizzly Years: In Search of the American Wilderness and serving as the model for the well-known character George Washington Hayduke in Edward Abbey's novel The Monkey Wrench Gang. Doug is the co-founder of several conservation organizations including Round River Conservation Studies and Save The Yellowstone Grizzly.
Mark Doty is an American poet and memoirist best known for his work My Alexandria. He was the winner of the National Book Award for Poetry in 2008.
Diane Ackerman is an American poet, essayist, and naturalist known for her books and films.
Mary Ruefle is an American poet, essayist, and professor. She has published many collections of poetry, the most recent of which, Dunce, was longlisted for the National Book Award in Poetry and a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize. Ruefle's debut collection of prose, The Most Of It, appeared in 2008 and her collected lectures, Madness, Rack, and Honey, in 2012, both published by Wave Books. She has also published a book of erasures, A Little White Shadow (2006).
Richard Shelton was an American writer, poet and emeritus Regents Professor of English at the University of Arizona.
A. Van Jordan is an American poet. He is a professor at Stanford University and was previously a college professor in the Department of English Language & Literature at the University of Michigan and distinguished visiting professor at Ithaca College. He previously served as the first Henry Rutgers Presidential Professor at the Rutgers University-Newark. He is the author of four collections: Rise (2001), M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A (2005), Quantum Lyrics (2007), and The Cineaste (2013). Jordan's awards include a Whiting Writers Award, a Pushcart Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
John D'Agata is an American essayist. He is the author or editor of six books of nonfiction, including The Next American Essay (2003), The Lost Origins of the Essay (2009) and The Making of the American Essay—all part of the trilogy of essay anthologies called "A New History of the Essay". He also wrote The Lifespan of a Fact, "Halls of Fame", and "About a Mountain".
Beth Ann Fennelly is an American poet and prose writer and was the Poet Laureate of Mississippi.
Novuyo Rosa Tshuma is a Zimbabwe-born writer and professor of creative writing. She is the author of Shadows, a novella, and House of Stone, a novel.
Kim Todd is an American author. She is also a professor of creative writing at the University of Minnesota. She has written essays and several books of nonfiction, primarily about environmental history and the natural sciences.
Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic is 2012 non-fiction book by David Quammen. The book, written in narrative form, tells through the personal experiences of the author, who interviewed numerous pathologists and virologists globally to trace the evolution of some of the major pathogens that have affected the human species following a species leap (spillover), a natural process by which an animal pathogen evolves and becomes able to infect, reproduce and transmit within the human species, in a process called zoonosis. Spillover received positive reviews.
The Sowell Family Collection in Literature, Community, and the Natural World, housed in Texas Tech University's Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library in Lubbock, Texas, preserves the journals, drafts, correspondence, ephemera, born-digital and audio visual media of 28 American writers on the natural world. Selected portions of the collection may be viewed online and in person. According to a census of Collection finding aids available from the Texas Archival Resources Online, there are currently around 1340 linear feet of processed materials in the Collection, including ephemera documenting its own history.
Marian T. Place was an American author who wrote nonfiction, fiction and juvenile fiction books as well as essays relating to the American West. She wrote more than 40 books under her own name and several pseudonyms.
