F. Joseph Callahan Distinguished Lecture presented in partnership with ThinkForum- Elizabeth Kolbert
Elizabeth Kolbert has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1999. Her essays have also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Vogue, and Mother Jones, and have been anthologized in The Best American Science and Nature Writing and The Best American Political Writing. She edited The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2009. A collection of her work, The Prophet of Love and Other Tales of Power and Deceit was published in 2004. Prior to joining the staff of The New Yorker, Kolbert was a political reporter for The New York Times. Kolbert traveled from Alaska to Greenland, and visited top scientists, to get to the heart of the debate over global warming. The result is The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, a book about mass extinctions that weaves intellectual and natural history with reporting in the field began as an article in The New Yorker. It was a New York Times 2014 Top Ten Best Book of the Year and is number one on the Guardian’s list of the 100 Best Nonfiction Books of all time. The Sixth Extinction also won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in the General Nonfiction category, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle awards for the best books of 2014
Her most recent book, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future, is about humanity’s harmful impact on the environment and ideas to rectify that harm. A national bestseller, Under a White Sky, was named one of the best books of the year by the Washington Post, Time, Esquire, Smithsonian Magazine, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, and Library Journal.