UC Davis English professor and poet Gary Snyder is the recipient of the Bollingen Prize in Poetry, awarded by Yale University and one of the nation's most prestigious literary honors. Every two years, the $50,000 prize goes to a living poet whose work represents the highest achievement in the field of American poetry. The selection committee described Snyder's work as bringing together "the physical life and the inward life of the spirit to write poetry as solid and yet as constantly changing as the mountains and rivers of his American, and universal, landscapes." Snyder, 66, is a Pulitzer Prize winner, and the author of both poetry and nonfiction books. He was one of the major figures of the Beat generation in the late 1950s, and later lived in Japan and became interested in Zen Buddhism. Among his books are "Turtle Island," "No Nature: New and Selected Poems," and his most recent work, "Mountains and Rivers without End."