J. Drew Lanham
A native of Edgefield, South Carolina, J. Drew Lanham is a poet, memoirist, naturalist, playwright, professor, and a recipient of a 2022 MacArthur Fellowship “genius” grant. He is the author of The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature (2016), which received both the Reed Award from the Southern Environmental Law Center and the Southern Book Prize and was a finalist for the John Burroughs Medal.
Additionally, he is the author of Sparrow Envy: A Field Guide to Birds and Lesser Beasts (2021) and Joy is the Justice We Give Ourselves (2024). A nonfiction book, Range Maps: Birds, Blackness and Loving Nature Between the Two, is forthcoming from Farrar Strauss and Giroux. Lanham is the Poet Laureate of Edgefield County and a Distinguished Professor of Wildlife Ecology and Master Teacher at Clemson University.
Additionally, he is the author of Sparrow Envy: A Field Guide to Birds and Lesser Beasts (2021) and Joy is the Justice We Give Ourselves (2024). A nonfiction book, Range Maps: Birds, Blackness and Loving Nature Between the Two, is forthcoming from Farrar Strauss and Giroux. Lanham is the Poet Laureate of Edgefield County and a Distinguished Professor of Wildlife Ecology and Master Teacher at Clemson University.
