California's Wild Coast: Poetry, Prints, and History - Paperback

by Tom Killion (Author), Gary Snyder (With)

Gold Medal Winner, California Book Awards

Winner, NCIBA Book of the Year Award

Winner, Northern California Book Reviewers Recognition Award

A show-stopping collaboration between artist Tom Killion & poet Gary Snyder with writings by Robinson Jeffers, Robert Hass, Jaime de Angulo, and more.

Previously published as California's Wild Edge: The Coast in Prints, Poetry, and History, this volume captures the beauty of the California coast from Mendocino, Point Reyes, and the San Francisco Bay down through Carmel, Big Sur, Santa Barbara, and Santa Monica. Woodcut artist Tom Killion's prints (over 90 in this collection) combine exquisite color with dynamic composition to portray the coast's ever-changing moods and diverse formations: storm tides crashing at Point Lobos, serene moonlit coves at Mendocino, fog encircling the Golden Gate Bridge. Deepening our experience are poetry and prose from Gary Snyder, as well as selections from Native Californian traditional stories, accounts of travelers, and poems by Robinson Jeffers, Robert Hass, and Jaime de Angulo. As Tamalpais Walking and The High Sierra of California did for lovers of mountains, California's Wild Coast will delight anyone who has seen (or wants to see) the meeting of land and the Pacific.

Author Biography

Gary Snyder is a poet, author, scholar, cultural critic, and professor emeritus of the University of California at Davis who has published sixteen books of poetry and prose, including The Gary Snyder Reader (1952-1998) . He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His Turtle Island won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1975, and his book-length poem Mountains and Rivers Without End won the Bollingen Prize in poetry in 1997. In 2008 he was awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement.

Woodcut and letterpress artist Tom Killion grew up in Marin County, California, on the slopes of Mt. Tamalpais, where the rugged scenery inspired him from an early age to create landscape prints strongly influenced by traditional Japanese woodblock prints. Along with publishing fine art letterpress books, Killion holds a PhD in African history from Stanford University and has taught history at several Bay Area universities. He is the founder of The Quail Press and his extensively illustrated books include 28 Views of Mount Tamalpais, The Coast of California, and Walls: A Journey Across Three Continents. Killion and Gary Snyder previously collaborated on The High Sierra of California, which was published by Heyday in 2002 and Tamalpais Walking, published in 2009. You can find out more about his artwork at tomkillion.com.