Online Program: Poetry & Science: Naturalists and Nature Poets with Rick Cech & Yanyi

In a continuation of our series presenting scientists in conversation with poets, Rick Cech—field observer, nature photographer, and natural history author—engages with award winning poet Yanyi, author of The Year of Blue Water—in a conversation about the subtle but enlightening differences between naturalists and nature poets, and ways of observing nature.

Special thanks to Laura Manuelidis for her generous support of this series.

An active field naturalist since childhood, also now a natural history author and photographer, Rick Cech is an affiliate curator at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History in Entomology. He is the principal author and photographer of Butterflies of the East Coast: An Observer’s Guide (Princeton, 2005), and wrote “A Distributional Checklist of the Butterflies and Skippers of the New York City Area.” Rick co-authored the National Audubon Society Regional Guide to Florida. His recent works include editing and photography for the iApp “Audubon Butterflies – A Field Guide to North American Butterflies,” and development of the FoldingGuides regional butterfly series.

Yanyi is a writer and critic. In 2018, he won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, awarded by Carl Phillips, for his first book, The Year of Blue Water (Yale University Press, April 2019). Currently, he is poetry editor at Foundry, poetry review editor at Public Books, and an MFA candidate at New York University. He formerly served as Director of Technology and Design at The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, senior editor at Nat. Brut, and curatorial assistant at The Poetry Project. He is the recipient of fellowships from Asian American Writers Workshop and Poets House. Find his recent work in Granta, Tin House, and The Los Angeles Review of Books.