Environmental writer Barry Lopez won the 1986 National Book Award for “Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape.”

Brown College will sponsor two visiting environmental writers and scholars this spring: National Book Award-winner Barry Lopez, one of the most distinguished voices in environmental literature today, and Daniel Philippon, a U.Va. alumnus and environmental scholar at the University of Minnesota. They will give public talks at several U.Va. and Charlottesville locations.

Acclaimed both for his fiction and nonfiction writing, Lopez will present a reading and talk on environmental issues at 8 p.m., March 29, at the Charlottesville Senior Center. At 8 p.m. March 30, he will read from his work in the U.Va. Rotunda Dome Room, with a reception and book-signing to follow.

Lopez won the National Book Award for his 1986 work, “Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape.” Among several works of fiction, his most recent short-story collection is “Light Action in the Caribbean.”

Philippon, director of the Program in Agriculture, Food and Environmental Ethics at Minnesota, will discuss Edgar Alan Poe’s imaginative writing about Albemarle County’s Ragged Mountains at 2 p.m. on April 4. The program will begin at the trailhead of Charlottesville’s Ragged Mountain Natural Area. (For details, call 924-7859.) On April 5, Philippon will speak on literary history and the classic nature writer Aldo Leopold. The talk will be at 1 p.m. in Jefferson Hall on U.Va.’s West Range.

Philippon’s most recent book is “Conserving Words: How American Nature Writers Shaped the Environmental Movement.”

He received his Ph.D. in English from U.Va. and was the first Sara Brown Fellow in Environmental Literaure at Brown College.
For more information, contact Michael Lundblad at Brown
College at 924-7859 or lundblad@virginia.edu.