Christopher Cokinos

THOUSAND OAKS, CA - An award-winning nature writer will talk about extinct bird species at California Lutheran University in February.

Christopher Cokinos will present “Re-civilization: Extinction, Heresy and Hope” at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 24, in Overton Hall. As part of his talk, he will read selections from his 2000 nonfiction book, “Hope is the Thing with Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds.” The free event, part of the university’s Artists and Speakers Series, ties into Cal Lutheran’s emphasis on multidisciplinary approaches and environmental issues.

Cokinos is an associate professor of English at the University of Arizona where he teaches creative writing and curates The Next American Nature and Science Writing series. Affiliated with the university’s Institute of the Environment, Cokinos has strong interests in research-based nonfiction writing on nature and science, and science fiction as literature. Other interests include climate change (especially geoengineering), extinction, natural history, space sciences, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and improving science communications.

He is the author of the literary nonfiction book “The Fallen Sky: An Intimate History of Shooting Stars,” the lyric essay collection “Bodies, of the Holocene” and the poetry chapbook “Held as Earth.” His current book project is a history of the scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

“Hope is the Thing with Feathers” won the Glasgow Prize and the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award. For “The Fallen Sky,” Cokinos received a National Science Foundation grant to participate in a meteorite-hunting expedition in Antarctica. The book was a finalist for the Saroyan Prize.

Cokinos’ books have been featured and praised in such media outlets as “All Things Considered,” People magazine, the Boston Globe, Nature, Science, and Natural History. His poems, reviews, essays and aphorisms have appeared widely in such publications as Poetry, Science, Birder World, Hotel Amerika, Orion, The New York Times and The American Scholar. His essays have won the John Burroughs natural-history essay prize and the FineLine Lyric Prose Prize from Mid-American Review. He contributes to both the Los Angeles Times and High Country News.

Overton Hall is located south of Memorial Parkway and west of Regent Avenue on the Thousand Oaks campus. For more information, contact Jacqueline Lyons at jlyons@callutheran.edu or 805-493-3825.