Author Diane Ackerman is also a poet and essayist whose musings on the intersections between nature and human nature appear regularly in The New York Times, The New Yorker, National Geographic and Smithsonian. Several of Ackerman’s books have been Pulitzer Prize and National Book Circle Critics’ Award finalists. She also has the rare distinction of having a molecule named after her: dianeackerone, a pheromone in crocodilians. (photo by Sue Michlovitz)
Celebrated author Diane Ackerman will read from The Zookeeper’s Wife at Bard College on Monday, October 30. A little-known true story of World War II, The Zookeeper’s Wife enjoyed months as The New York Times’ Number One nonfiction best-seller, was the basis for a 2017 feature film of the same title and received the Orion Book Award, which honored it as “a groundbreaking work of nonfiction, in which the human relationship to nature is explored in an absolutely original way through looking at the Holocaust.”
Ackerman will be introduced by novelist and Bard literature professor Bradford Morrow. The reading, presented as part of Morrow’s Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading series, takes place at 2:30 p.m. at the Weis Cinema in the Bertelsmann Campus Center and will be followed by a question-and-answer session. It is free and open to the public; no reservations are required.
Ackerman’s other works of nonfiction include An Alchemy of Mind, a poetics of the brain based on the latest neuroscience; Deep Play, which considers play, creativity and our need for transcendence; A Slender Thread, about her work as a crisis-line counselor; The Rarest of the Rare and The Moon by Whale Light, in which she explores the plight and fascination of endangered animals; On Extended Wings, her memoir of flying; and her best-seller, A Natural History of the Senses. Her most recent book, The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us, a celebration of the natural world, human ingenuity and planetary change, received the PEN Henry David Thoreau Award for Nature Writing.
Several of Ackerman’s books have been Pulitzer Prize and National Book Circle Critics’ Award finalists. She also has the rare distinction of having a molecule named after her: dianeackerone, a pheromone in crocodilians. Her essays about nature and human nature have appeared for decades in The New York Times, The New Yorker, American Scholar, Smithsonian, National Geographic and elsewhere.
For more information about the Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading series, call (845) 758-7054 or visit www.conjunctions.com.