National Book Award Winner Barry Lopez comes to Tulane

National Book Award winner and decorated author Barry Lopez will give a reading of and talk about his work at Tulane on March 2nd, 6:00 PM, Diboll Gallery (Room 300), The Commons. This is the final event of the 2019-2020 Environmental Studies Speaker Series, "American Water and Actual Air."

Over a long and decorated career, Lopez has written with vividness and specificity about the natural world and the people and creatures for whom the landscape is home. Robert McFarlane of the Guardian describes the experience of first reading Lopez's work thus: 

"I first encountered Barry Lopez’s work in 1997, buying a copy of Arctic Dreams from a Vancouver bookshop because I was attracted by the picture of an iceberg on the cover, and intrigued by its subtitle: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape. I subsequently read it while walking the west coast of Vancouver Island over several days. Arctic Dreams was to me – as it has been to so many others – a revelation. It was a life-changing book. Its braiding of cultural and natural history, archaeology, ethnography, philosophy and something very like prose-poetry was both audacious and graceful. Lopez broke open for me the possibilities of what we still weirdly call “non-fiction” (thereby defining it only in negative and restricting relation to fiction). I was only, of course,  catching up with what millions of readers had known for a decade: Arctic Dreams was recognized as a landmark work immediately on publication in 1986, winning a National Book award and staying in the US bestseller lists for months. It has never been out of print and now, in our fast-warming world, reads as a premonitory elegy for a vanishing Arctic."

There will be a book signing following. Mr. Lopez' books, including his latest work, Horizon, will be available for purchase in the University bookstore in the LBC, as well as outside Diboll Gallery immediately prior to the event.

The event is free and open to the public. For more information contact: tbeller@tulane.edu