In his 2016 book, The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature, J. Drew Lanham traces his love of birds and nature back to his family’s small farm in rural South Carolina. Lanham is also the author of Sparrow Envy: Field Guide to Birds and Lesser Beasts (2021) and Joy is the Justice We Give Ourselves (2024), both published by Hub City Writers Project.

Lanham has published in a variety of leading journals and media platforms, including Audubon, Orion, Vanity Fair, Forest Ecology and Management, and Oxford American. He is poet laureate of Edgefield, South Carolina.

Lanham received a BA (1988), an MS (1990), and a PhD (1997) from Clemson University, where he is currently Alumni Distinguished Professor of Wildlife Ecology and Master Teacher in the Forestry and Environmental Conservation Department. He was an inaugural fellow of the Audubon-Toyota Together Green Initiative and is an Advisory Council member of the North American Association for Environmental Education. In 2022, he received a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Award.

(Adapted from the MacArthur Foundation website: https://www.macfound.org/fellows/class-of-2022/joseph-drew-lanham).

LEARN MORE ABOUT THE AWARD: https://thoreausociety.org/about/thoreau-prize/

An evening honoring

J. Drew Lanham

winner of the
Henry David Thoreau Prize
for
Literary Excellence in Nature Writing

Friday, October 25

7:00 PM

Trinitarian Congregational Church, 54 Walden St.

Joseph Drew Lanham is an ornithologist, naturalist, writer, and poet combining conservation science with personal, historical, and cultural narratives of nature. Lanham's research and teaching focuses on the impacts of forest management on birds and other wildlife. He brings this ecological knowledge as well as his perspective as a Black man living in the South to bear on his work as a storyteller, poet, and passionate advocate for bird-watching, outdoor recreation, and environmental conservation and stewardship.

Signed copies of his books will be available at the event.