Diane Ackerman

Diane Ackerman received an M.F.A. and Ph.D. from Cornell University. Her works of nonfiction include The Human Age (The World Shaped by Us); her memoir One Hundred Names For Love, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Circle Critics Award; the bestseller, The Zookeeper's Wife, about one of the most successful hideouts of World War II; An Alchemy Of Mind, a poetics of the brain based on the latest neuroscience; Cultivating Delight; Deep Play; A Slender Thread; The Rarest Of The Rare; The Moon By Whale Light; A Natural History Of Love; On Extended Wings; and the bestseller A Natural History Of the Senses. Her poetry has been published in leading literary journals, and in the books Origami Bridges, I Praise My Destroyer, Jaguar Of Sweet Laughter, Lady Faustus, Reverse Thunder, Wife Of Light, and The Planets. She also writes nature books for children.

Ms. Ackerman has received many prizes and awards, including an honorary degree from Kenyon College, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the John Burroughs Nature Award, Orion Book Award, Lavan Poetry Prize, and the PEN John David Thoreau Award, as well as being honored as a Literary Lion by the New York Public Library. She also has the unusual distinction of having a molecule named after her. She has taught at a variety of universities, including Columbia and Cornell, and she hosted a PBS series based on A Natural History Of the Senses.

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