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A Brief Biography

Awarded the Bollingen Poetry Prize for Poetry in 1997, Gary Snyder joins a select circle of American poets, including Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, W.H. Auden and Robert Frost. In conferring the award, Bollingen Judges Kenneth Koch, Penelope Laurans and J.D. McClatchey said, "Gary Snyder, throughout a long and distinguished career, has been doing what he refers to in one poem as 'the real work.' 'The real work' refers to writing poetry, an unprecedented kind of poetry, in which the most adventurous technique is put at the service of the great themes of nature and love. He has brought together the physical life and the inward life of the spirit to write poetry as solid and yet as constantly changing as the mountains and rivers of his American--and universal--landscape."

Snyder was born in San Francisco, and raised in the Pacific Northwest, and his earliest experiences there in the natural and wild worlds imprint his work and thought to this day. He graduated from Reed College with a degree in literature and anthropology, and he was instrumental--with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac--in the Beat Generation/San Francisco movements of the late 1950s. For most of the 1960s he lived in Japan and studied formally in a Zen monastery, and the influence of Zen Buddhism continues as a powerful implicit and explicit influence in his thought. In 1970, he returned to the United States, taking up residence--with his wife and two young sons--in the Sierra Nevada foothills of Northern California. Since 1970, his work has taken on a distinctly ecological edge. His move to the former "Gold Country" galvanized an interest in the unique character of a wild place, particularly in a region ravaged by hydraulic gold mining in the late 1880s. He has been a leading spokesperson for "reinhabitation"--both in public and through his literary work--for the possibilities and necessities of recreating an organic relationship with a natural bioregion.

His writing and thought have done much to introduce such concepts as "stewardship," "reinhabitation," "bioregion," and "watershed" in both poetic discourse and public policy illuminating the intertwining strands of literary form, social responsibility, ethical conduct and cultural inclusiveness. Snyder has balanced the demands of both popular and scholarly literary audiences and those of the international environmental movement that has burgeoned since the first Earth Day in May 1970.

As a practical extension of his spiritual and philosophic convictions on the rights of all sentient beings and nonsentient forms, Snyder has been actively involved in local, regional and national political efforts. He was appointed to the California Arts Council by Governor Jerry Brown in 1974, and served for six years as an active member of that arts/cultural organization during its most productive and controversial period.

A reflection of the unusual balance of his literary, ecological, and public policy interests is the conferring of two distinctive literary awards--the Bollingen Prize for Poetry and the John Hay Award for Nature Writing--within two weeks of each other in early 1997. The first acknowledges his literary standing; the second recognizes the service of his work in environmental efforts. As a spokesperson for "those without voice--the trees, rocks, rivers, and bears--in the political process," Gary Snyder has come to occupy international standing as a representative for the rights and lives of the unvoiced in our societies. Three recent international video features (one on BBC-TV and two on PBS-TV) have focused on this calling. At "Watershed," a national conference on literature and the natural world convened at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. in April 1996, he addressed an overflow audience of 1000+ as keynote speaker. U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Haas (himself a leading poet/environmentalist of our time), introduced him as "a friend, colleague and a major literary figure of the twentieth century. A major poet and ethical voice in the best honored traditions of the American Thoreau and the Japanese haiku-master Dogen. His work makes us far more alive and attentive; it reaches into our deepest and best resources, heartens us to the challenges and promises of restoration to a natural place from which many of us now feel ourselves estranged."

He is married to Carole Koda and has two sons and two young step-daughters. They live on a mountain farmstead in the Yuba River watershed of the northern Sierra Nevada, where he was an active founding member of the Ring of Bone zendo for Zen Buddhist practice in the region. He has been awarded the prestigious Buddhism Transmission Award for 1998 by the Japan-based Bukkyo Dendo Kyokai Foundation (Buddhist Awareness Foundation). The internationally recognized foundation makes annual awards to distinguished scholars, artists, and monks who make outstanding contributions to the theory and practice of Buddhism. Snyder, the first American literary figure to receive the award, is honored for distinctive contributions in linking Zen thought and respect for the natural world across a lifelong body of poetry and prose.

Gary Snyder has taught at the University of California, Davis since 1985. A member of the Creative Writing Program, Department of English, he works with a broad range of other artists, scientists, environmentalists and public policy specialists in accommodating the rights of the natural and wild in postmodern society. While he travels and lectures internationally, he is active in regional educational programs with national impact. They include the founding of "The Art of the Wild,"(1992), an annual writing conference on wilderness and creative writing featured in late 1996 in a one-hour documentary on PBS-TV. He was also instrumental in the founding of the widely-acclaimed UC Davis "Nature and Culture," (1993), a national model undergraduate academic major program for students of society and the environment.