Gary Snyder, renowned as a poet, a Zen Buddhist and a pioneering environmentalist, will read from his work at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, at 8 p.m. on Tuesday, September 14. The program, in the Page Commons Room, Cotter Union, is open to the public free of charge.

Snyder, with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, was instrumental in defining the Beat generation and the San Francisco movement of the late 1950s. In 1959 he published his first of more than a dozen volumes of poetry, and he subsequently has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship (1969-70), a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1975) and the prestigious Bollingen Prize for Poetry (1997). He also received the John Hay Award for Nature Writing (1997) for his work as an environmentalist and the 1998 Buddhism Transmission Award for contributions to the theory and practice of Buddhism.

Snyder currently lives in the northern Sierra Nevada mountains in California and teaches at the University of California at Davis. The Bollingen Prize citation credited him with writing "an unprecedented kind of poetry, in which the most adventurous technique is put at the service of the great themes of nature and love."

Snyder's reading will inaugurate Colby's 1999-2000 Visiting Writers Series.