Gary Snyder is an internationally known, Pulitzer Prize-winning environmental poet. Snyder was born in San Francisco, and raised in the Pacific Northwest. He graduated from Reed College with a degree in literature and anthropology. Since 1970, his work has taken on a distinctly ecological theme. His move to the former “Gold Country” galvanized an interest in the unique character of a wild place, particularly in a region ravaged by hydraulic gold mining in the late 1880s. He has been a leading spokesperson for “reinhabitation”—both in public and through his literary work for the possibilities and necessities of recreating an organic relationship with a natural bioregion. His writing and thought have done much to introduce such concepts as “stewardship,” “reinhabitation,” “bioregion,” and "watershed" in both poetic discourse and public policy and Snyder has been actively involved in local, regional and national political efforts. At “Watershed,” a national conference on literature and the natural world convened at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. in April 1996, he addressed an overflow audience of 1000+ as keynote speaker.