Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gary Snyder, who teaches English at the University of California, Davis, received today the campus's highest faculty peer honor -- selection as the 2000 Faculty Research Lecturer. The announcement marks the 58th annual presentation of the most prestigious kudo conferred by the Davis Academic Senate, which is made up of all UC Davis ladder-rank faculty members. Traditionally the recipient presents a springtime lecture on campus, which this year will take place Thursday, May 4. The award is the latest in a series of accolades for Snyder, who joined the UC Davis campus in 1986 as an English professor. During the past few years, Snyder received Yale University's Bollingen Prize in Poetry, the Buddhism Transmission Award given by Japan's Bukkyo Dendo Kyokai Foundation, and, a year ago, the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund writer's award. Snyder received a Pulitzer Prize in 1975 for his work, "Turtle Island." He is a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. When Snyder received the prestigious Bollingen Prize -- previous winners of which include William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost and Robert Penn Warren -- the selection committee said this about him: "Gary Snyder, throughout a long and distinguished career, has been doing what he refers to in one poem as 'the real work.' 'The real work' is writing poetry, for Snyder an unprecedented kind of poetry, in which the most adventurous technique is put at the service of the great themes of nature and of love. He has brought 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." Born in 1930, Snyder graduated from Reed College with a degree in literature and anthropology. Snyder was associated with the Beat generation of poets when he lived in San Francisco in the late 1950s. Later, he moved to Japan because of his interest in Zen Buddhism. Since 1970, he has lived in Northern California with his family in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. Among Snyder's 18 books of poetry and prose are "Turtle Island," "No Nature: New and Selected Poems," "The Practice of the Wild," "Mountains and Rivers Without End," and last year, "The Gary Snyder Reader (1952-1998)," which includes prose, essays, poetry, journals and letters, including some new material. In 1997, Snyder spoke to Utne Reader about "Mountains and Rivers Without End," his 1996 book that is one long poem made up of shorter poems. In progress for nearly 40 years, the work takes the reader from the Pacific Northwest to Japan to Manhattan to the Southwest. Here is what Snyder says about the poem: "The traveling in this poem is a metaphor for impermanence. We travel in time, we travel in space. We ourselves have gone through many different forms in passing through the millennia. On the one side we're capable of being deeply placed -- grounded; on the other side we are all just impermanent travels on an impermanent landscape. "In the poem, and in my essays, I'm trying to enlarge people's understanding of the word wild. Its negative meaning is 'out of control, undisciplined,' but its positive meaning is 'in control' -- self-organized, self-maintaining. That's the nature of our planet; it regulates itself." Robert Haas, poet laureate of the United States for 1995-97, described Snyder as "one of the most gifted poets from a gifted generation of poets" in a 1996 New York Times Magazine story. Further, Haas said, "As for 'Mountains and Rivers' it tracks his thinking from a young anarchist and radical environmentalist to a more subtle sense of environmentalism. And yet, remarkably, the cycle has the force and concentration of a very shaped work of art." Snyder's influence at UC Davis includes his role as a founder of the campus's innovative Nature and Culture program, established in the mid-1990s. Some years earlier, Snyder had invited a group of faculty to explore ways to more effectively teach and research at the intersection of the humanities and environmental sciences, says David Robertson, also an English professor. "It took us seven years to get the program fully established, and Snyder was a major force in this process, both as a source of good ideas and as a 'big name,'" Robertson said. The Faculty Research Lecturer award was established in 1941 by the Davis Sigma Chi club and is given annually to a faculty member whose research contributions have greatly enhanced human knowledge and brought widespread honor and recognition to themselves and the university. In 1951, the UC Davis Academic Senate assumed responsibility for the award. The most recent recipients have been George Bruening, professor of plant pathology, Samuel Armistead, professor of Spanish literature, Donald Rothchild, professor of political science, Sandra Gilbert, professor of English, and Peter Marler, professor emeritus of biology and psychology.