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James Prosek

Roles: Special Guest

Prosek discussed An Evening with JAMES PROSEK.

Artist, writer, naturalist, and Yale graduate James Prosek made his authorial debut at nineteen years of age with Trout: an Illustrated History (Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), which featured seventy of his watercolor paintings of the trout of North America. Prosek has written for The New York Times and National Geographic Magazine and won a Peabody Award in 2003 for his documentary about traveling through England in the footsteps of Izaak Walton, the seventeenth-century author of The Compleat Angler. He co-founded a conservation initiative called World Trout in 2004 with Yvon Chouinard, the owner of Patagonia clothing company, which raises money for coldwater habitat conservation through the sale of T-shirts featuring trout paintings. He is working on a book of paintings of Atlantic fishes for Rizzoli and a project about naming nature.

His book Eels: An Exploration, from New Zealand to the Sargasso, of the World’s Most Amazing and Mysterious Fish, was published by HarperCollins in September 2010 and is the subject of a documentary for PBS series Nature to air in spring 2013. His latest book is a collection of paintings of 35 Atlantic fishes called Ocean Fishes (Rizzoli, 2012). In autumn of 2012 Prosek was awarded the Gold Medal for Distinction in Natural History Art from the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia.

Prosek is a curatorial affiliate of the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale, and a member of the board of the Yale Institute for Biospheric Studies. He is working on a book about how we name and order the natural world.

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