Writer Wendell Berry to visit Sept. 22-25

Wendell Berry

Poet, novelist, essayist and farmer Wendell Berry will be a visit- ing writer at U.Va.'s Brown College Sept. 22-25.

A former English professor at the University of Kentucky, Berry has worked a farm in Henry County, Ky., since 1965. His 32 books, which include the landmark environmental work The Unsettling of America: Agriculture and Culture (1977), have chronicled his search for a life deeply connected to his community and to the land.

"My work has been motivated," Berry wrote, "by a desire to make myself responsibly at home in this world and in my native and chosen place."

An organic farmer who eschews tractors for horses, Berry deplores the replacement of diverse small farms with corporate agribusiness in this century, saying it has ravaged both the soil and the nation. He sometimes sounds like a latter-day Thomas Jefferson, even quoting him in one poem: "small/ landholders are the most precious part of the state."

Berry will meet with students informally and in classes during his visit to the residential college, along with giving two talks.

He has been a fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, and has received numerous awards for his work, including one from the National Institute and Academy of Arts and Letters and, most recently, the T.S. Eliot Award.

• Talk: Sept. 23, 10 a.m., at Ivy Creek Natural Area.
• Reading: Sept. 23, 8 p.m. at the U.Va. bookstore. Both events are free and open to the public.