The Community Library’s Hemingway Writer-In-Residence, Jared Farmer, will discuss the book project he is working on while in residency–Survival of the Oldest: Ancient Trees in Modern Times–his project’s local connection to the Wood River Valley, and about the craft and process of nonfiction writing.
Join us outside on the Library’s Donaldson Robb Family Green, and bring your low-back chairs and blankets.
Jared Farmer is the Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. His temporal expertise is the long nineteenth century; his regional expertise is the North American West. His recent work has turned to global environmental history across the modern period. Originally from Provo, Utah, Farmer earned his degrees from Utah State University, the University of Montana, and Stanford. His book On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape (Harvard, 2008) won the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians for the best-written non-fiction book on an American theme, a literary award that honors the “union of the historian and the artist.” His subsequent book, Trees in Paradise: A California History (Norton, 2013), won the Ray Allen Billington Prize from the Organization of American Historians for the best book on the history of Native and/or settler peoples in frontier, border, and borderland zones of intercultural contact in any century to the present. In 2014, the Dallas Institute presented Farmer the Hiett Prize in the Humanities; in 2017, the Carnegie Corporation of New York named him an Andrew Carnegie Fellow; and in 2018, the American Academy in Berlin awarded him a Berlin Prize. His forthcoming book is Survival of the Oldest: Ancient Trees in Modern Times (Basic Books). For previews, see his op-eds in the Los Angeles Times from 2017 and 2020, and a recent interview in Humanities. In collaboration with Penn students, Farmer has begun a new research project called “Petrosylvania.” On Instagram, he posts @geohumanist.
Photo credit: Eric Sucar, UPenn.
