Sunday, March 31, 4 PM:  Author Event featuring Justin Gardiner (formerly of Eugene).  Justin’s book is “Beneath the Shadow: Legacy and Longing in Antarctica" (Univ. of Georgia Press).  In February 2010 Justin boarded a ship bound for Antarctica. A stowaway of sorts, Gardiner used his experiences on this voyage as a firsthand account that breathes new life into the nineteenth-century journals of Antarctic explorers such as Captain Robert Falcon Scott, Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton, and Captain Roald Amundsen.

With equal parts levity and lyricism, Gardiner navigates the distance between the historical and the contemporary, the artistic and the scientific, the heroic and the mundane. The bold and tragic tales of Antarctic explorers have long held our collective imagination--almost as much as the mythically remote land such explorers ventured to--and this book makes those voices come to life as few ever have.

Justin Gardiner holds an MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson College, where he was awarded the Larry Levis Stipend in 2012. He has also served as the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Fellow—a one-of-a-kind, twelve-month backcountry residency sponsored by PEN Northwest. His first book manuscript of poems has been chosen as a finalist for both the Brittingham/Pollak Prize and the Four Way First Book Prize, among others; and his poems have appeared in journals that include The Missouri Review, Quarterly West, The Southern Humanities Review, New South, and ZYZZYVA, among others. Currently he is working on a book of creative nonfiction, consisting of twelve linked nature essays, each set in a different park or wilderness area.