Other honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the John Burroughs Nature Award, the Lavan Poetry Prize, and grants from the Rockefeller Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets. Astronomer Carl Sagan, who was also a member of her doctoral committee, served as technical advisor for the book.Īckerman has won both the Poets Prize and the Peter I.B.

Her research for the book included “night watches at the space shuttle” and watching the fly-bys at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Her first, The Planets: A Cosmic Pastoral (1976), was written while she was a student at Cornell University. She has published several collections of poetry, including Origami Bridges (2003), I Praise My Destroyer (2000), and Reverse Thunder (1992). Defending her use of scientific language and material in her poetry, Ackerman has said, “Not to write about Nature in its widest sense because quasars or corpuscles are not ‘the proper realm of poetry,’ as a critic once said to me, is not only irresponsible and philistine, it bankrupts the experience of living, it ignores much of life’s fascination and variety.”Īckerman’s poetry, often rhymed, engages the world around her, and her poetry collections, like her prose, are usually structured as lyrical searches. Ackerman has also written several books for children and coedited Norton’s Book of Love (1998) with Jeanne Mackin.Īckerman brings the same wonder and attention to the particular to her poetry as she does to her prose, and she often works on projects in both genres at the same time, incorporating ideas from one into the other.

She is well known for both her poetry and her nonfiction writing. Her books of prose include The Human Age: The World Shaped By Us (2014), a New York Times bestseller and winner of the PEN Henry David Thoreau Prize the memoir One Hundred Names for Love (2011), finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award The Zookeeper’s Wife (2007), winner of the Orion Book Award and the best-selling A Natural History of the Senses (1990). A poet, essayist, and naturalist, Diane Ackerman earned an MFA and a PhD from Cornell University.

A history of love by diane ackerman