(CEDAR FALLS, Iowa) – Elizabeth Kolbert, a Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer and journalist, will visit the University of Northern Iowa for a public talk and other events on Sept. 20 and 21.
A public talk, “An Evening with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Elizabeth Kolbert: On The Sixth Extinction,” will be on Thursday, Sept. 20, at 7 p.m. in the Strayer-Wood Theatre. The event is free and open to the public.
Kolbert’s book The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in the General Nonfiction category, and was a New York Times 2014 Top Ten Best Book of the Year.
There have been five mass extinctions over the last half billion years, when the diversity of life on earth dramatically contracted. In the book, Kolbert reports on the current human-propelled sixth extinction, following scientists around the world who study species already gone and others facing elimination.
On Friday, Sept. 21, 10-11 a.m. in Lang Hall Auditorium, Kolbert will meet with UNI students and faculty. Alexa Sedlacek, Assistant Professor of Earth & Environmental Sciences, will be moderating a Q&A session with Kolbert and students. The event is free and open to the public.
Elizabeth Kolbert has been a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine since 1999. Her series on global warming, “The Climate of Man,” appeared in The New Yorker in the spring of 2005 and won the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s magazine award. In 2006, she received the National Academy of Sciences Communication Award. She has also been awarded a National Magazine Award in the Reviews and Criticism category for her work in The New Yorker, the Sierra Club’s David R. Brower Award, and the Walter Sullivan Award for Excellence in Science Journalism from the American Geophysical Union. In 2017 she received the Blake-Dodd Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Reviews of The Sixth Extinction and other selected readings available at https://guides.lib.uni.edu/leopold-lectures/kolbert.
Elizabeth Kolbert is one of four visiting speakers in the new Aldo Leopold Distinguished Lecture Series. For more information, including other speakers, please see https://leopold-lectures.uni.edu.