Friday, March 01, 2002

WILMINGTON, NC – Acclaimed science/nature writer David Quammen will present “The Improbable Lion: Big Predators in a Crowded World” at 7:30 p.m., Thursday, March 14, in the UNCW Warwick Center Ballroom. The UNCW Honors Scholars Program is sponsoring this free, public event.

Quammen is a two-time National Magazine Award winner for his science essays and columns Outside magazine. His work has also appeared in National Geographic, Harper’s, Rolling Stone and The New York Times Book Review.

His March 14 presentation at UNCW will focus on large predators such as the lion in Western India. The lion, along with the saltwater crocodile, Romanian brown bear and Siberian tiger are among the predators Quammen explores in a forthcoming non-fiction book. His 1996 Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in the Age of Extinctions dealt with the history of evolutionary theory, biodiversity, population dynamics and extinction. Essay collections by Quammen include The Flight of the Iguana, Boilerplate Rhino: Nature in the Eye of the Beholder and Wild Thoughts from Wild Places. He also edited The Best American Science and Nature Writing in 2000.

Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and educated at Yale and Oxford universities, Quammen resides in Bozeman, Mont. He has received numerous awards and fellowships including an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the John Burroughs Medal for nature writing and the New York Public Library’s Helen Berstein Book Award.

For more information, contact the UNCW Honors Scholars Program at 910/962-4181. A photo of Quammen is available to download from the Web at www.uncwil.edu/news/releases/march02/quammen.html.