Keynote Speaker:
Robert Michael Pyle

ROBERT MICHAEL PYLE was born in 1947 in Denver and raised in Aurora, Colorado. A professional writer since 1982, Pyle has published hundreds of papers, essays, stories, and poems. His books have won the John Burroughs Medal for Distinguished Nature Writing, a Guggenheim Fellowship, three Washington Governor's Writers Awards, a Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, and the Harry B. Nehls Award in Nature Writing. The fourteen titles include Wintergreen, The Thunder Tree, Where Bigfoot Walks, Chasing Monarchs, and Walking the High Ridge: Life as Field Trip (in the Milkweed Editions Credo Series); as well as Nabokov's Butterflies, The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Butterflies, the Handbook for Butterfly Watchers, and most recently, The Butterflies of Cascadia. Forthcoming are a pastorale about his rural home and valley; collections of poems and essays; and a novel set in Colorado. His column "The Tangled Bank" appears regularly in Orion magazine, and recent work has been published in The North American Review and several anthologies.

Pyle received a B.S. in Nature Perception and Protection and M.S. in Nature Interpretation from the University of Washington, and a Ph.D. in conservation ecology from Yale University's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. In 1971, during a Fulbright Fellowship at the Monks Wood Experimental Station in England, Pyle founded the Xerces Society for invertebrate conservation, and later chaired its Monarch Project. A lifelong conservationist, he received a 1997 Distinguished Service Award from the Society for Conservation Biology.

Bob has worked as butterfly conservation consultant for the government of Papua New Guinea, Northwest Land Steward for The Nature Conservancy, and visiting professor or writer in residence at Utah State, Portland State, and Oregon State universities, the universities of Virginia, Alaska and Montana, and Evergreen State, Lewis & Clark, Sweet Briar, and Peninsula colleges. He has lectured, keynoted, and read in many cities and countries, taught numerous field courses and writing seminars all over the U.S., and appeared on NPR's "E-Town" and "All Things Considered" as well as "Good Morning America."

Bob lives along Gray's River, a tributary of the Lower Columbia River, with botanist and silkscreen artist Thea Linnaea Pyle.