Ackerman to discuss, reflect on 100 Names for Love

Poet, essayist, and naturalist Diane Ackerman will discuss "100 Names for Love" when she visits Skidmore College Wednesday, Nov. 16. Free and open to the public, the talk will begin at 5:30 p.m. in Davis Auditorium, Palamountain Hall. A book-signing and light refreshments will follow the talk.

Author of two dozen books, Ackerman most recently published 100 Names for Love: A Stroke, a Marriage, and the Language of Healing (2011, W.W. Norton). It is a memoir on her experience caring for her husband (fellow writer Paul West) following his stroke and through his recovery. In his  review  for The New York Times, Abraham Verghese writes, "Ackerman weds exquisite writing with profound insights, this time into speech and imagination." Booklist calls 100 Names for Love "A gorgeously engrossing, affecting, sweetly funny, and mind-opening love story of crisis, determination, creativity, and repair."

Ackerman's awards and honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Orion Book Award, John Burroughs Nature Award, and the Lavan Poetry Prize, as well as being named a Literary Lion by the New York Public Library. She also has the rare distinction of having a molecule found in reptilian secretions named after her --dianeackerone. Her essays about nature and human nature have been appearing for decades in The New York Times, Smithsonian, Parade, The New Yorker, National Geographic and many other journals. She hosted a five-hour PBS television series inspired by A Natural History of the Senses.

Click here to visit Ackerman's web site.

Skidmore's departments of Psychology and English, as well as the Neuroscience Program and Stuent Speakers Bureau, are sponsors of the lecture.