Biographical note

Gary Snyder is a poet, essayist, and environmental activist. He is the author of eighteen books, among them Danger on Peaks; Mountains and Rivers Without End; No Nature, a finalist for the 1993 National Book Award; The Practice of the Wild; Left Out in the Rain, New Poems 1947--1985; Axe Handles, winner of an American Book Award; and Turtle Island, which received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Snyder has been the subject of innumerable essays, five critical books, and countless international interviews. His work and thinking have been featured in video specials on BBC-TV and PBS, including Bill Moyers's The Language of Life PBS series, and in every major national print outlet. Snyder's honors include the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, the Bollingen Prize, the John Hay Award for Nature Writing, a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, the Bess Hokin Prize and the Levinson Prize from Poetry, the Los Angeles Times Robert Kirsch Lifetime Achievement Award, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and the Shelley Memorial Award. He was elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2003. He is a professor emeritus of English at the University of California, Davis. Julia Martin is a South African writer and literary scholar. Her longstanding involvement in the work of Gary Snyder is part of a broader interest in ecological thought, metaphors of interconnectedness, and the representation of place. In addition to her academic work in ecocriticism she writes creative nonfiction. Her travel memoir, A Millimetre of Dust: Visiting Ancestral Sites (2008), is a narrative essay about archaeology and the apprehension of deep time. She lives with her family in Cape Town, where she teaches English at the University of the Western Cape.