Robert Michael Pyle to visit Cathlamet Public Library

Robert Michael Pyle to visit Cathlamet Public Library

Local author, scholar, biologist, and poet, Robert Michael Pyle, will visit Cathlamet Public Library on Saturday, September 21 at 3 p.m., to share information about his current and upcoming writings, and his passion for butterflies and the protection of their habitats. His extensive educational and practical experience include a Ph.D. in Lepidoptera Ecology and Conservation from Yale University, and work as a Ranger-Naturalist in Sequoia National Park, butterfly ecologist in Papua New Guinea, Northwest Land Steward for The Nature Conservancy, and co-manager of the Species Conservation Monitoring Center in Cambridge, U.K. In 1971, he founded the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation (http://www.xerces.org/).

In 35 years as a full-time writer, biologist, teacher, and speaker, Pyle has published hundreds of articles, essays, peer-reviewed papers, stories, and poems. His 24 books include Wintergreen, The Thunder Tree, Where Bigfoot Walks, Chasing Monarchs, Walking the High Ridge, Sky Time in Gray’s River, and Mariposa Road: The First Butterfly Big Year, three poetry collections, and a flight of butterfly books including The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Butterflies, The Butterflies of Cascadia, and Butterflies of the Pacific Northwest. His first novel, Magdalena Mountain, recently came out from Counterpoint Press. Pyle's essays from 52 consecutive issues of Orion and Orion Afield magazines (now combined) are published in The Tangled Bank by Oregon State University Press. The Tidewater Reach: A Field Guide to the Lower Columbia River in Poems and Pictures (with Judy VanderMaten) and Nature Matrix: New and Selected Essays will come out in 2019-2020.

Pyle's books have received numerous awards including the John Burroughs Medal and a Guggenheim Fellowship, while his poems have received three nominations for the Pushcart Prize. Pyle is currently collaborating with Nirvana/Giants in the Trees bassist Krist Novoselic and Ray Prestegard on an album of poems and acoustic guitar songs.

Pyle has spoken and taught for colleges and institutes around the world, from Tajikistan to Tasmania. In recent years he has served as Visiting Professor of Environmental Writing at Utah State University; Kittredge Distinguished Visiting Writer at the University of Montana; and instructor at Bread Loaf, Fishtrap, and many other writing and natural history centers. For almost 40 years he has dwelled beside, observed, studied, and written about Grays River, a tributary of the Lower Columbia River, in the Willapa Hills of southwest Washington.