Artist, naturalist, evolutionist and travel writer James Prosek to speak at New Paltz

NEW PALTZ – On Monday, April 25, the English Department and Evolutionary Studies Program at SUNY New Paltz will welcome artist and author James Prosek. He will deliver a free public lecture entitled “Eels and Naming Nature,” an event that will serve as the capstone event in this year’s Evolutionary Studies (EvoS) Seminar Series.

Often using evolution as a foundational framework for his thinking (much the way Darwin did in his naturalistic writing and illustrating), Prosek is the author of the recent Eels: An Exploration, From New Zealand to the Sargasso, of the World’s Most Amazing and Mysterious Fish, published by HarperCollins. An accomplished visual artist, travel writer, nature writer, creative non-fiction writer, and musician, he published his first book, Trout: An Illustrated History, featuring seventy of his watercolor paintings of the trout of North America, when he was still a junior in college. His Bird, Butterfly, Eel, Fly-Fishing the 41st From Connecticut to Mongolia and Home Again: A Fisherman’s Odyssey, the young adult book The Day My Mother Left, and other works followed. Prosek has written for the New York Times and National Geographic, and in 2003 won a Peabody Award for his documentary about traveling through England in the footsteps of Izaak Walton, the seventeenth-century author of The Compleat Angler, to this day a virtual bible for fishing enthusiasts. He is also a curatorial affiliate of the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale and a member of the board of the Yale Institute for Biospheric Studies.

His paintings have been shown in galleries and museums throughout the United States and abroad, including a current show at the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University and upcoming exhibits in Monaco and Philadelphia. Further information is available at his website, www.jamesprosek.com. Prosek’s lecture is free and open to the public. It will be held 5:30-6:30 p.m. in Lecture Center 102. Off-campus visitors are reminded to purchase one-time parking passes at the park-and-pay machines located at Hawk Drive at the West entrance, Lot 28 across from the Hopfer Admissions & Alumni Center, and Lot 5 adjacent to Parker Theater. Contact Dan Glass in advance for prepaid parking passes or with questions (glassyd@gmail.com).

This event is primarily co-sponsored by the English Department (www.newpaltz.edu/english) and the Evolutionary Studies Program (www.newpaltz.edu/EvoS) – along with signifant support from CAS, EvoS Club, EvoS Program, Evolutionary Psychology Lab, LAS, SSE, Major Connections, and SA.