Diane Ackerman
Bestselling Author, Poet & Naturalist
"Ackerman calls herself an ‘earth ecstatic’ and proves it by writing about nature with tremendous spirit, exuberant lyricism, and lively intelligence....Ackerman electrifies us with her all-embracing sense of life—its energy, beauty, danger, and magic...." —Booklist
“Ackerman’s rich prose is a bridge to a world of discovery...." —BookPage
"Diane Ackerman is a great dramatist and explorer of the sensual world; her poems probe, open, take off lids, peel back covers, taste, sniff. There is no limit to her curiosity; she is constantly discovering surprises. —The New York Times Book Review
The incandescent Diane Ackerman is a poet and writer whose works reflect an unending curiosity about and wonder of the natural world. The Washington Post describes her as "an artist who sketches with tender words the small miracles of a vast universe." Her works of nonfiction include the bestselling books, A Natural History of the Senses (1991) and The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story (2008), about one of the most successful hideouts of World War II—a tale of people, animals, and subversive acts of compassion. Dawn Light: Dancing with Cranes and Other Ways to Start the Day, a book about 'waking up' to each passing moment was published in 2009. Other nonfiction titles include: An Alchemy of Mind, a poetics of the brain based on the latest neuroscience; Cultivating Delight: A Natural History of My Garden; Deep Play, which considers play, creativity, and our need for transcendence; A Slender Thread, about her work as a crisis line counselor; The Rarest of the Rare and The Moon by Whale Light, in which she explores the plight and fascination of endangered animals; A Natural History of Love; and On Extended Wings, her memoir of flying. Forthcoming in 2011 is her second memoir entitled 100 Names For Love: A Stroke, a Marriage, and the Language of Healing. Atul Gawande states, “This is Diane Ackerman's most enjoyable, intimate, and heartrending work yet. No poet knows the brain better than Diane Ackerman; and no brain was more poetic than the one belonging to her own husband, whom she is forced to watch devastated by a stroke and nurse through years-long rebuilding. Ackerman is vivid and unflinching in describing the anatomy of decline and repair—not only in her novelist-husband but also in herself and their suddenly transformed relationship.”
Ackerman's poetry has been published in leading literary journals. Maxine Kumin says of it, "I know enough to know when I'm in the presence of a brilliant mind. Her acrobatic poems are full of fact and exuberance." Her poetry books are Origami Bridges: Poems of Psychoanalysis and Fire; I Praise My Destroyer; Jaguar of Sweet Laughter: New and Selected Poems; Lady Faustus; Reverse Thunder: A Dramatic Poem; Wife of Light; The Planets: A Cosmic Pastoral.
Her essays about nature and human nature have appeared in The New York Times, Smithsonian, Parade, The New Yorker, National Geographic, and many other journals, where they have been the subject of much praise. She hosted a five-hour PBS television series inspired by A Natural History of the Senses. She also writes nature books for children. Those titles include: Animal Sense; Monk Seal Hideaway; and Bats: Shadows in the Night. Says The Chicago Sun, "If you're lucky you have someone in your life like Diane Ackerman—smart and capable, and successful in the world of grownups, but still brimming with the kind of infectious enthusiasm and wonder generally found only in children."
Diane Ackerman was born in Waukegan, Illinois. She received an MA, MFA, and PhD from Cornell University and has received many prizes and awards, including a D. Litt. from Kenyon College, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the John Burroughs Nature Award, and the Lavan Poetry Prize, as well as being honored as a Literary Lion by the New York Public Library. She also has the rare distinction of having a molecule named after her—dianeackerone. She has taught at a variety of universities, including Columbia and Cornell.
About 100 NAMES FOR LOVE: A STROKE, A MARRIAGE, AND THE LANGUAGE OF HEALING (forthcoming 2011)
100 Names for Love is a highly dramatic love story and medical miracle story, one that combines science, inspiration, wisdom, and heart. Or: It's about being lost and found again. A distinguished man's lost mind, lost words, lost self. A lost relationship between two witty, playful lovers that had spanned over 30 years. And their determination to regain what could be found, re-imagine what couldn't, and, by using unusual tools and methods, create a new love story. Diane Ackerman’s 74-year-old husband, Paul, had a severe stroke while she was on book tour for An Alchemy of Mind. She had just spent years studying neuroscience, which made her both the worst and the best person to have a loved one with a stroke. She knew what had happened, and also that there was no cure, no return to the life they had lived together. This, and her 35-year relationship with Paul, made her see past the limitations doctors told her to expect. Ultimately, she discovered techniques on her own to retrain his remaining brain to use parts that hadn't been used for years. Five years after his stroke, Paul is now a medical anomaly, a man diagnosed with total global aphasia (the complete inability to process language in any form), who has returned to writing during his three most fluent hours each day. This wasn’t easy to achieve; it took hard work, creative thinking by both Ackerman and her husband, and, most of all, the decision not to give up on a loved one, or on one's self, before trying everything, and discovering what treasures can still be found.
About DAWN LIGHT (2009)
"Cascading details, sensuous celebrations, and hard-won insights form a glorious spectrum reaching from deep dark to 'dawn light' as Ackerman, fluent in both sorrow and joy, awakens a keen appreciation for the cycles and interconnectivity of life." —Donna Seaman, Booklist
In the same way that medieval monks had "Books of Hours", with suggested meditations and prayers for different hours of the day, Diane Ackerman's Dawn Light is a "Book of Dawns". Each short chapter is about a different dawn and a different facet of nature, chronicling the changing of the seasons over the course of a year, from January to December, in locales around the world.
Dawn is also a metaphor for conscious awareness, as in, 'it dawns on me that.....' So this book is also about trying to 'wake up' to each passing moment. To that end, it is chock-full of small astonishments and secular hallelujahs. Like A Natural History of the Senses, Dawn Light is an exceptional example of the genre of which Diane Ackerman is the acknowledged master—the wide-ranging nature essay that also teaches us about ourselves. It is the product of a mind full of facts, inclined to poetry, and in love with not only all creatures great and small, but every weird and colorful adaptation of the natural world. Joining science's devotion to detail with religion's appreciation of the sublime, Dawn Light is an impassioned celebration of the miracles of evolution—especially human consciousness of our numbered days on a turning earth. You will discover a sense of intimacy with animals; details of natural history, insights about human nature, and Ackerman's lyrical prose and sensibility all in abundance. The LA Times Book Review writes, "Dawn Light extends far beyond a time of day into a general celebration of our continually renewed existence. We are not separate from those trees, the author insists; we are always in nature, of nature... In Ackerman's view, it's all knit together, this life on Earth, all connected and glorious. And there's no better time to reexamine it than at first light."
About THE ZOOKEEPER'S WIFE: A WAR STORY (2008)
"Here is a true story—of human empathy and its opposite—that is simultaneously grave and exuberant, wise and playful. Ackerman has a wonderful tale to tell, and she tells it wonderfully." —Washington Post Book World
The Zookeeper's Wife is about one of the most successful hideouts of World War II. It's a tale of people, animals, transcendence, and subversive acts of compassion. "Jan Zabinski, the innovative director of the Warsaw Zoo, and Antonina, his empathic wife, lived joyfully on the zoo grounds during the 1930s with their young son, Ryszard (Polish for lynx), and a menagerie of animals needing special attention. The zoo was badly damaged by the Nazi blitzkrieg; and their bit of paradise would have been utterly destroyed but for the director of the Berlin Zoo, Lutz Heck, who wanted Jan’s help in resurrecting extinct “pure-blooded species” in pursuit of Aryan perfection in the animal kingdom. Resourceful and courageous, the Zabinskis turned the decimated zoo into a refuge and saved the lives of several hundred imperiled Jews. Ackerman has written many stellar works but this is the book she was born to write. Sharing the Zabinskis’ knowledge of and reverence for the natural world and drawing on her poet’s gift for dazzling metaphor, she captures with breathtaking precision and discernment our kinship with animals, the barbarity of war, Antonina’s unbounded kindness and keen delight in “life’s sensory bazaar,” Jan’s daring work with the Polish Underground, and the audacity of the Zabinskis’ mission of mercy. An exemplary work of scholarship and an “ecstasy of imagining,” Ackerman’s affecting telling of the heroic Zabinskis’ dramatic story illuminates the profound connection between humankind and nature, and celebrates life’s beauty, mystery, and tenacity.” —Booklist
The Zookeeper's Wife Interview with Powell's Books
