Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and environmentalist Gary Snyder is scheduled to deliver the Hopwood Lecture at the Graduate and Undergraduate Hopwood Awards Ceremony at 3:30 p.m. April 24 at Rackham Auditorium.
Snyder always has considered himself a poet of the Pacific Rim, says Keith Taylor, Department of English MFA adjunct faculty and coordinator, Undergraduate Creative Writing. “After undergraduate studies in the early ‘50s, and time spent in and around San Francisco, some of it with the Beats, some alone on mountaintops, Snyder went off to Japan for most of a decade, studying in a Zen monastery,” he says.
Upon his return, Snyder published “Back Country” and “Regarding Wave,” two of the essential poetry collections of the 1960s. In 1970, he and his family moved to the Sierra Nevada Mountains, where he has lived ever since. In 1975, Snyder won a Pulitzer Prize for “Turtle Island.” His collection of essays, “The Practice of the Wild,” has become one of the central texts of the American environmental movement.
