Arts Council presents award-winning author

Michael P. Branch, author of “Raising Wild: Dispatches from a Home in the Wilderness” and four other books as well as numerous essays, articles and reviews, will read selections from his nonfiction works on Saturday from 5-7 p.m. at the Oats Park Arts Center.

The event is free and open to the public for his readings of “Raising Wild” and “Rants from the Hill.” Branch is an award-winning writer. The Ellen Meloy Fund for Desert Writers chose Branch as the recipient of the 12th annual Desert Writers Award. A grant of $5,000 will support work on his book-in-progress, “Jackalope!: The Complete Natural and Cultural History.”

“I have long sought to understand and share the work of environmental writers from Emerson, Thoreau and Muir to Ed Abbey, Terry Tempest Williams and Rick Bass,” Branch wrote in response to the award. “I deeply admire and often teach the work of Ellen Meloy, whose books regularly appear as required reading in my courses on Literary Nonfiction, Environmental Literature, and the Literature of the American West.”

Branch is a professor in the University of Nevada, Reno’s esteemed Literature and Environment Program. He has published five books and more than 200 articles, essays and reviews. He is co-founder and past president of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment. Branch holds a bachelor’s degree from the College of William and Mary and doctorate in English from the University of Virginia. He teaches creative non-fiction, environmental and film studies courses.

Gary Snyder has noted that “Raising Wild” is remarkably “interesting, lively, non-theoretical and hopeful ... it points forward, not back.”

Branch’s website describes him as a “father, desert rat, environmentalist, and curmudgeon who lives with his wife and two young daughters at 6,000 feet in the remote western Great Basin Desert, on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada Range.