When Annie Dillard won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975, she was the youngest women ever to do so. She won for a book published the previous year called Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which is a nonfiction book that meditates on writing, solitude, the natural world, and spirituality. The book had a profound impact at the time of its publication and garnered comparisons to Henry David Thoreau’s Walden.  

Dillard has gone on to have genre bending career, publishing over a dozen titles including book-length nonfiction, novels, essays, and criticism, in addition to more than 25-years of teaching at universities in the Pacific Northwest and the east coast. In 2015 she was awarded the National Humanities Medal for her life’s work.

In this talk, her characteristic sense of irony and humor elicits huge laughs from the audience and her generous spirit invites quiet attention when she tells a story. She reads two excerpts — first from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and then from a book of essays called Teaching a Stone to Talk. Whether she is describing muskrats in Virginia or witnessing an eclipse in the Yakima Valley, she draws profound insights into the nature of existence and what the natural world has to tell us about ourselves.

Annie Dillard is born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1945, in a poet and author best known for her prose in both fiction and nonfiction. Dillard has been considered a major voice in American literature since she published Pilgrim at Tinker Creek in 1974 and won a Pulitzer Prize. Influenced by Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman, Dillard writes compressed, lyric poetry and prose that engages the balance of daily life within the frame of literature and ideas.

Dillard’s numerous books include the poetry collections Tickets for a Prayer Wheel and Mornings Like This: Found Poems; the nonfiction books Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, An American Childhood, For the Time Being, and The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New; and the novels The Living and The Maytrees.

A member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Dillard also holds honorary doctorates at Boston College, the University of Hartford, and Connecticut College. Additional honors include grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, a New York Press Club Award for Excellence, an Appalachian Gold Medallion, a Campion Award, and an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She received the National Endowment for the Humanities Medal in 2014, awarded to her by President Barack Obama.