“There is a way that nature speaks, that land speaks. Most of the time we are simply not patient enough, quiet enough, to pay attention to the story.”  — Linda Hogan

Chickasaw poet, BEI Emeritus Fellow, novelist, essayist, and environmentalist Linda Hogan will receive the 2016 Henry David Thoreau Prize for Nature Writing.

Hogan is the author of the poetry collections Calling Myself Home (1978); Daughters, I Love You (1981); Eclipse (1983); Seeing Through the Sun (1985), which won the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation; Savings (1988), The Book of Medicines, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist (1993); and Rounding the Human Corners (2008). Intimately connected to her political and spiritual concerns, Hogan’s poetry deals with issues such as the environment and eco-feminism, the relocation of Native Americans, and historical narratives, including oral histories. William Kittredge, in his introduction to Hogan’s Rounding the Human Corners, noted, “poets like Linda, through their language, open for us a doorway into their specific resonating dream of the electric universe.”

Hogan’s collections of prose also reflect her interests in the environment and Native American culture. Her books include the essay collection Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World (1995), The Woman Who Watches Over the World: A Native Memoir (2001), and, with Brenda Peterson, Sighting: The Gray Whales’ Mysterious Journey (2002). Together with Brenda Peterson, she also edited the anthologyThe Sweet Breathing of Plants: Women and the Green World (2001). A recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation for her fiction, Hogan’s novels include Mean Spirit(1990), Solar Storms(1995), Power (1998), and People of the Whale: A Novel (2008).

Active as an educator and speaker, Hogan taught at the University of Colorado and at the Indigenous Education Institute. She has been a speaker at the United Nations Forum and was a plenary speaker at the Environmental Literature Conference in Turkey in 2009.

Hogan’s awards include a Lannan Literary Award, the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Spirit of the West Literary Achievement Award, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas.