Robert Michael Pyle  

Pyle's popular essay-column, “The Tangled Bank,” appeared in fifty-two consecutive issues of Orion Magazine and Orion Afield, and has just come out in book form from Oregon State University Press as The Tangled Bank: Writings from Orion. A Colorado novel, Magdalena Mountain, is on deck, along with collections of poems, stories, and selected essays. His manuscript Evolution of the Genus Iris topped the long-list for the 2011 Idaho Prize for Poetry.

Bob Pyle has taught writing and natural history seminars for many conferences, institutes, and colleges around the world, and presented hundreds of invited lectures and keynote addresses. In recent years he has served as Visiting Professor of Environmental Writing at Utah State University; as Kittredge Distinguished Visiting Writer at the University of Montana; and as place-based writing instructor from Alabama to Alaska, Tajikistan to Tasmania, and beyond.

For thirty years, Pyle has been an independent, full-time biologist, writer, teacher, and speaker. He has published over five hundred articles, essays, papers, stories, and poems His sixteen books include Wintergreen, The Thunder Tree, Where Bigfoot Walks, Chasing Monarchs, Walking the High Ridge, Sky Time in Gray’s River, and Mariposa Road: The First Butterfly Big Year; as well as The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Butterflies, The Butterflies of Cascadia, and several other standard butterfly works. They have been awarded the John Burroughs Medal, a Guggenheim Fellowship, three Governor's Writer's Awards, a Pacific Northwest Booksellers' Award, the Harry Nehls Award for Nature Writing, and the National Outdoor Book Award for natural history literature, and have been runner-up for the Orion, Green, PNBA, and Washington Book Awards.

ROBERT MICHAEL PYLE dwells with his wife, Thea, a botanist and weaver, in an old Swedish farmstead in southwest Washington. His sixteen books include the John Burroughs Medal-winning Wintergreen, The Thunder Tree, Sky Time in Gray’s River, and Mariposa Road. A Guggenheim Fellow and founder of The Xerces Society, he is often associated with butterflies, slugs, and Bigfoot.