John Muir, also known as "John of the Mountains" and "Father of the National Parks", was an influential Scottish-American naturalist, author, environmental philosopher, botanist, zoologist, glaciologist, and early advocate for the preservation of wilderness in the United States of America.
Aldo Leopold was an American author, philosopher, naturalist, scientist, ecologist, forester, conservationist, and environmentalist. He was a professor at the University of Wisconsin and is best known for his book A Sand County Almanac (1949), which has been translated into fourteen languages and has sold more than two million copies.
Ernest Bloch was a Swiss-born American composer. Bloch was a preeminent artist in his day, and left a lasting legacy. He is recognized as one of the greatest Swiss composers in history. As well as producing musical scores, Bloch had an academic career that culminated in his recognition as Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley in 1952.
Charles Bufe, better known as Chaz Bufe, is a contemporary American anarchist author. Bufe primarily writes on the problems faced by the modern anarchist movement, and also on atheism, music theory and intentional community.
Joseph Wood Krutch was an American author, critic, and naturalist who wrote nature books on the American Southwest. He is known for developing a pantheistic philosophy.
Robert Michael Pyle is an American lepidopterist, writer, teacher, and founder of the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation. Much of his life story is told in the 2020 feature film The Dark Divide, where Pyle is played by David Cross.
Nature writing is nonfiction or fiction prose or poetry about the natural environment. Nature writing encompasses a wide variety of works, ranging from those that place primary emphasis on natural history facts to those in which philosophical interpretation predominate. It includes natural history essays, poetry, essays of solitude or escape, as well as travel and adventure writing.
Gary Paul Nabhan is an agricultural ecologist, Ethnobotanist, Ecumenical Franciscan Brother, and author whose work has focused primarily on the plants and cultures of the desert Southwest. He is considered a pioneer in the local food movement and the heirloom seed saving movement.
Charles Clyde Bowden was an American non-fiction author, journalist and essayist based in Las Cruces, New Mexico.
My Side of the Mountain is a middle-grade adventure novel written and illustrated by American writer Jean Craighead George published by E. P. Dutton in 1959. It features a boy who learns courage, independence, and the need for companionship while attempting to live in the Catskill Mountains of New York State. In 1960, it was one of three Newbery Medal Honor Books (runners-up) and in 1969 it was loosely adapted as a film of the same name. George continued the story in print, decades later.
Juan Felipe Herrera is an American poet, performer, writer, cartoonist, teacher, and activist. Herrera was the 21st United States Poet Laureate from 2015 to 2017.
Donald Lowrie was an American newspaper writer and author. He became a well-known advocate of prison reform work upon the release of his book My Life in Prison, in which he reflects on his ten-year incarceration in San Quentin State Prison north of San Francisco, California.
Richard Shelton is an Arizona writer, poet and emeritus Regents Professor of English at the University of Arizona. He has written nine books of poetry; his first collection of poems, The Tattooed Desert, won the International Poetry Forum's U.S. Award. His 1992 memoir Going Back to Bisbee, a New York Times Notable Book was selected for the One Book Arizona program in 2007. Shelton also won the Western States Book Award for Creative Nonfiction in 1992 for Going Back to Bisbee. In 2000, Shelton received a $100,000 grant from the Lannan Foundation to complete two books.
Mount Tamalpais College, formerly known as the Prison University Project, is a two year liberal arts college that offers an associate's degree program in General Studies and intensive college preparatory courses in math and writing to mainline residents of San Quentin State Prison. Courses are all taught on-site by volunteers, most of them graduate students, instructors, and faculty members from San Francisco Bay Area colleges and universities. Until 2020, the college was operated as an extension site of Patten University by the Prison University Project, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. All credits and degrees were issued by Patten. Since 2020, Mount Tamalpais College has issued its own credits and degrees as a Candidate for Accreditation by the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges. The college achieved Initial Accreditation in January 2022.
Maynard Dixon was an American artist whose body of work focused on the American West. He was married for a time to American photographer Dorothea Lange.
David Rains Wallace is an American writer who has published more than twenty books on conservation and natural history, including The Monkey's Bridge and The Klamath Knot. He has written articles for the National Geographic Society, The Nature Conservancy, the Sierra Club, and other groups. Wallace's work also has appeared in Harper's Magazine, The New York Times, Sierra, Wilderness and other periodicals.
Debra Bloomfield is an American photographer. She has photographed extensively in Mexico, the American Southwest, Alaska, and California, and has taught photography in the San Francisco Bay Area for over 30 years.
Alison Hawthorne Deming is an American poet, essayist and teacher, former Agnese Nelms Haury Chair in Environment and Social Justice and currently Regents Professor Emerita in Creative Writing at the University of Arizona. She received a 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship.
The United States Penitentiary, Tucson is a high-security United States federal prison for male inmates in Arizona. It is part of the Tucson Federal Correctional Complex and is operated by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, a division of the United States Department of Justice. The facility also has a satellite prison camp for minimum-security male offenders.
Soul on Ice is a memoir and collection of essays by Eldridge Cleaver. Originally written in Folsom State Prison in 1965, and published three years later in 1968, it is Cleaver's best known writing and remains a seminal work in African-American literature. The treatises were first printed in the nationally-circulated monthly Ramparts and became widely read for their illustration and commentary on Black America. Throughout his narrative, Cleaver describes not only his transformation from a marijuana dealer and serial rapist into a convinced Malcolm X adherent and Marxist revolutionary, but also his analogous relationship to the politics of America.
