Gary Snyder

Best known as a poet and prose writer, Gary Snyder is the author of more than seventeen books, translated into more than twenty languages, and is professor emeritus at the University of California, Davis, Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1975 and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1992 and 2005, he has won numerous other awards. Snyder is also a translator of a number of classical Chinese poems and is best known for his translations of the Tang dynasty hermit poet Han Shan (“Cold Mountain”). He lived for more than ten years in Kyoto, Japan, where he studied Zen Buddhism. (Photo credit: Beth Nakamura/The Oregonian)