Wyoming Arts Council

Christopher Cokinos coming to UW

Uncategorized | October 3, 2007

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The University of Wyoming Art Museum and the MFA Program are pleased to announce a talk by award-winning nature and science writer Christopher Cokinos. Cokinos will speak on The Fallen Sky: A Private History of Shooting Stars, an account of his experiences as a meteorite hunter in the polar regions. The talk will take place at 7 p.m. on Monday, Oct. 22 in the Art Museum. Afterward, he will answer audience questions, and sign books at a short reception. The event is free and open to the public. The talk is held in concert with the Art Museum’s “Antarctica” exhibit, which celebrates the anniversary of the NSF’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program. For 50 years, the NSF has funded artists and writers to work side by side with scientists in Antarctica, helping them to translate the experience of that remote landscape into word and image. Antarctica also celebrates 2007-08 as the International Polar Year, the 100th anniversary of the discovery and exploration of the polar regions. The exhibit runs through Dec. 22.

Cokinos is Assistant Professor of English and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Environment and Society at Utah State University, where he also edits Isotope: A Journal of Literary Nature & Science Writing. His poems, essays and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Science, Birder’s World, Poetry, Iowa Review, Shenandoah, Orion, Turnrow and Ecotone. The recipient of both a Whiting Award and the Glasgow Prize for an Emerging Writer, Cokinos is the author of Hope Is the Thing with Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds (Warner, 2001). The result of 10 years of detective work, the book gives us, “poetically and movingly,” (Scientific American), the histories of six extinct North American birds, along with stories of the people who killed them off and those who tried to save them. “Even readers with no special interest in birds will be caught up in this marvelous book, a deeply moving cautionary tale about how we have systematically diminished the planet,” writes Publishers Weekly.
“Cokinos… transforms each extinction into a deeply disturbing tragedy—both for the species itself, and for human civilization.”

Hope Is the Thing with Feathers received the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award, and will be reprinted in 2008. Cokinos has also published a book of poems, Killing Seasons (Woodley Press, 1993). In 2003, Cokinos was awarded a National Science Foundation fellowship to join the Antarctic Search for Meteorites Expedition. While collecting meteorites with scientists, he spent five weeks on the Antarctic polar plateau, living with a stranger, in an unheated tent, in 24-hour daylight—an experience he found “beautiful and grueling.” He found himself battling insomnia and depression, passing the time with his tent-mate by doing impersonations of Mr. Burns and Smithers from The Simpsons. In the end, the expedition found more than 1,000 meteorites, including one from Mars. Still, the payoff for the journey was as much personal as scientific. “Sometimes,” Cokinos says, “we go out hunting something in the world—meteorites, histories, orchids, you name it—and end up finding ourselves too.” The full tale of his time in the Antarctic will appear in a non-fiction book, The Fallen Sky, which will be published by Tarcher/Penguin in 2008.

Cokinos’ talk is co-sponsored by the Art Museum and by the Haub School and Ruckelshaus Institute of Environment and Natural Resources. His visit is supported in part by a grant from the Wyoming Arts Council, through funding from the Wyoming State Legislature and the National Endowment for the Arts, which believes a great nation deserves great art.

The MFA Program is Wyoming’s graduate creative writing program, mentoring a new generation of writers and bringing to the state a wealth of literary talent from the region, the nation and the world. Each semester, the MFA Visiting Writers Series brings a number of
distinguished authors to Wyoming. Past guests include Terry Tempest Williams, David Quammen, Francine Prose, Pico Iyer, Alexandra Fuller and U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser.

The Art Museum is located in the Centennial Complex at 2111 Willett Drive. Hours for the museum and the Museum Store are 10am – 5pm Tues. – Sat. and 10am – 9pm Mon. For more information, please call 307-766-6620 or visit www.uwyo.edu/artmuseum
Further info: www.uwyo.edu/creativewriting

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