Writer John Christensen to Speak on Expedition Retracing

Writer Jon Christensen will present “From the Tide Pool to the Stars” at 7:30 p.m. Feb. 18 in the San Rafael Room of Fess Parker’s Doubletree Resort. Christensen will recount his expedition retracing John Steinbeck’s 1940 voyage with marine biologist Edward Ricketts exploring marine life along the coast of the Baja Peninsula.

The presentation is free and open to the public.

This event, sponsored by the Institute for the Liberal Arts at Westmont, will be the first public presentation on last spring’s Sea of Cortez Expedition led by Christensen and Stanford marine biologist William Gilly. Christensen will examine, through word and image, the unique collaboration between literature and science represented by Steinbeck’s and Rickett’s journey, and will weave together the lessons of that journey with those of last year’s expedition. The expedition was featured on National Public Radio’s “Radio Expeditions” series and followed closely by the Los Angeles Times, among many others.

Christensen, a former Steinbeck Fellow at San Jose State University, is working on a book about the expedition for Shearwater Books/Island Press. As a freelance writer and reporter, he contribute regularly to The New York Times, High Country News and Conservation in Practice, as well as to Nature, Outside, Mother Jones, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Sacramento Bee, the Nevada Appeal and the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Christensen is currently a research fellow in the Center for Environmental Science and Policy and the history department at Stanford University.

The presentation is part of the Institute for the Liberal Art’s Fifth Annual Conversation on the Liberal Arts at Westmont Feb. 18–19. This year’s conference, “Beyond Two Cultures: the Sciences as Liberal Arts,” will draw academic leaders and scholars from across the country, and features leading theoretical physicist S. James Gates and Cambridge literary scholar and historian of science Dame Gillian Beer, among others.

To learn more about the Sea of Cortez Expedition, please visit www.seaofcortez.org or the Radio Expeditions page under People and Places at www.npr.org. For more information about the presentation or the Conversation on the Liberal Arts, please visit www.westmont.edu/institute, or call the Institute for the Liberal Arts at 805-565-6239.