Environmental journalist Erik Reece at Penn State Behrend September 29, 2011

Environmental journalist Erik Reece, author of Lost Mountain: A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness and An American Gospel: On Family, History and the Kingdom of God, will read from his works at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College, on Thursday, Sept. 29.

Reece’s appearance in the college’s Creative Writers Reading Series takes place in the Larry and Kathryn Smith Chapel. A 5:30 p.m. reception for Reece will be followed by a 6 p.m. reading; both events are free and open to the public. Free parking will be available in the Junker Center lot.

Reece was a winner of Columbia University’s John B. Oakes Award for Distinguished Environmental Journalism and the Sierra Club’s David R. Brower Award for Lost Mountain, the chronicle of a year spent watching the mining death of one representative Appalachian peak. A native Kentuckian and the son of a coal worker, Reece contends that “mountain top” strip mining is not a local concern but a host of mainstream crises, from corporate hubris and government neglect to class conflict and poisoned groundwater to irrevocable species extinction and landscape destruction.

Reece’s writing regularly appears in Harper’s, Orion, The Nation, and major newspapers, and he is the author of the poetry collection Short History of the Present. He teaches at the University of Kentucky in Lexington.

Penn State Behrend’s annual Creative Writers Reading Series is produced by the college’s B.F.A. in Creative Writing degree program with support from the Clarence A. and Eugenie Baumann Smith Fund. The series also will host fiction writer Danielle Evans on Thursday, Oct. 6, and senior thesis readings by students on Thursday, Nov. 10 and 17.

For more information about the series, phone the Penn State Behrend School of Humanities and Social Sciences at 814-898-6108.