I was thrilled to learn that my book Entangled: People and Ecological Change in Alaska’s Kachemak Bay was selected for this award given to one book a year for distinguished natural history writing by the John Burroughs Association! It joins a list of awardees that began in 1926 with William Beebe’s Pheasants of the World and which includes Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us, Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac, Barry Lopez’ Of Wolves and Men, Loren Eiseley’s The Firmament of Time, and the many other natural history writers who have inspired me in my writing and conservation efforts. The inspirational Alaskan writers who have received the award include Adolf Murie (A Naturalist in Alaska, 1963), Victor Sheffer (A Year in the Life of a Whale, 1970), the (sadly and recently) late Richard Nelson (The Island Within, 1991) and Sherry Simpson, my teacher and mentor in the UAA Creative Writing and Literary Arts MFA program, for Dominion of Bears in 2015.
The award luncheon originally scheduled on April 6, 2020, at the Yale Club in New York City was postponed due to the COVID pandemic and is tentatively re-scheduled for April, 2021.
Entangled: Nature/Culture 