Gary Snyder

Poet, author, farmer, activist, and Buddhist scholar, Gary Snyder has published numerous collections of poetry and prose. A literature and anthropology major at Reed, Snyder was instrumental in the Beat Generation and San Francisco poetry movements of the’50s and ’60s. He studied linguistics and anthropology at Indiana University and East Asian languages at the University of California at Berkeley. From 1956 to 1968, he lived and studied in Kyoto, Japan. Snyder is an emeritus professor of the University of California at Davis. He has worked with a broad range of artists, scientists, environmentalists, and public policy specialists in dealing with the problems of nature and the wild in the global economy. His work has received the Pulitzer Prize, the Bollingen Prize for Poetry, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the International Award from the Buddhist Transmission Foundation. He is a member of the National Academy of Arts and Letters and once served on the California Arts Council. Snyder was a keynote speaker at the Watershed conference on literature and the environment in Washington, D.C., and was the subject of the documentary The Practice of the Wild. He lives on a mountain farmstead in the Northern Sierra of California.