J. Drew Lanham
Cultural Ornithologist, Naturalist, Educator
Award-winning Poet & Memoirist
MacArthur "Genius" Award Recipient
Readings &
Lecture Topics
- Coloring the Conservation Conversation
- An Evening with J. Drew Lanham
Biography
“Lanham memorably, vibrantly shows how choosing joy is an act of resilience, courage, and power.” —Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review
“Lanham is warmly contemplative, righteous, incensed, funny, and grateful. His poetics, knowledge, and dissent run deep; his poems are winged.” —Booklist
“The ornithologist J. Drew Lanham is lyrical in the languages of science, humans, and birds…. His way of seeing and hearing and noticing the present and the history that birds traverse—through our backyards and beyond—is a revelatory way to be present to the world and to life in our time.” —Krista Tippet, On Being
“Conservation, to me, is really love.” —J. Drew Lanham
An advocate for wild nature and social justice, J. Drew Lanham is a cultural ornithologist, naturalist, educator, and writer using robust science, artful essays, and evocative oratory to color the conservation conversation. He is the author of three books: The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature (2017), which was the Winner of the Southern Book Prize, the Reed Award from the Southern Environmental Law Center, a Nautilus Silver Award Winner, and a finalist for the John Burroughs Medal; Sparrow Envy: Field Guide to Birds and Lesser Beasts (2021); and Joy is the Justice We Give Ourselves (2024).
Guided by principles of interconnectedness and interdependence, Lanham’s work centers on the growing issues within environmental justice as observed through the multifaceted perspective of a Black Southern man. As a storyteller, poet, and passionate advocate for accessibility and stewardship, his writing is in praise of wandering and wildness. Lanham himself says: “I am a man in love with nature. I am an eco-addict, consuming everything that the outdoors offers its all-you-can-sense, seasonal buffet. I am a wildling, born of forests and fields and more comfortable on unpaved back roads and winding woodland paths than in any place where concrete, asphalt, and crowds prevail.”
Lanham’s Orion Magazine essay, “Forever Gone,” a lyrical treatise on extinction and cultural convergence, was chosen as a Best American Essay for 2018, by Rebecca Solnit. He has received a MacArthur “Genius” Grant (2022) as well as the Dan W. Lufkin Conservation Award from the National Audubon Society (2019), the Rosa Parks and Grace Lee Boggs Outstanding Service Award from the North American Association for Environmental Education (2016), the E. O. Wilson Award for Outstanding Science in Biodiversity Conservation from the Center for Biological Diversity (2020), and the Thoreau Award in 2024. Lanham served as the Poet Laureate of Edgefield, South Carolina (2022).
He is a Distinguished Professor of Wildlife Ecology and Master Teacher at Clemson University. He lives with his family on a farm in the upstate of South Carolina.
Short Bio
J. Drew Lanham is a cultural ornithologist, naturalist, educator, and writer using robust science, artful essays, and evocative oratory to color the conservation conversation. He is the author of three books: The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature (2017); Sparrow Envy: Field Guide to Birds and Lesser Beasts (2021); and Joy is the Justice We Give Ourselves (2024). Among his honors, Lanham has received a MacArthur “Genius” Grant (2022), the Dan W. Lufkin Conservation Award from the National Audubon Society (2019), the Rosa Parks and Grace Lee Boggs Outstanding Service Award from the North American Association for Environmental Education (2016), the E. O. Wilson Award for Outstanding Science in Biodiversity Conservation from the Center for Biological Diversity (2020), and the Thoreau Award in 2024. He served as the Poet Laureate of Edgefield, South Carolina in 2022. Lanham is a Distinguished Professor of Wildlife Ecology and Master Teacher at Clemson University. He lives with his family on a farm in the upstate of South Carolina.
Visit Author WebsiteVideos
Publications
Joy is the Justice We Give Ourselves
Poetry, 2024
In gorgeous and timely pieces, Joy Is the Justice We Give Ourselves is a lush journey into wildness and Black being. Lanham notices nature through seasonal shifts, societal unrest, and deeply personal reflection and traces a path from bitter history to the present predicament. Drawing canny connections between the precarity of nature and the long arm of racism, the collection offers reconciliation and eco-reparation as hopeful destinations from our current climate of division. In Joy is the Justice We Give Ourselves, Lanham mines the deep connection to ancestors through the living world and tunes his unique voice toward embracing the radical act of joy.
Sparrow Envy: Field Guide to Birds and Lesser Beasts
Poetry, 2021
“You are a rare bird, easy to see but invisible just the same.” That thought is close at hand in Sparrow Envy: Field Guide to Birds and Lesser Beasts, as renowned naturalist and writer J. Drew Lanham explores his obsession with birds and all things wild in a mixture of poetry and prose. He questions vital assumptions taken for granted by so many birdwatchers: can birding be an escape if the birder is not in a safe place? Who is watching him as he watches birds?
With a refreshing balance of reverence and candor, Lanham paints a unique portrait of the natural world: listening to cicadas, tracking sandpipers, towhees, wrens, and cataloging fellow birdwatchers at a conference where he is one of two black birders. The resulting insights are as honest as they are illuminating.
The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature
Nonfiction, 2017
“In me, there is the red of miry clay, the brown of spring floods, the gold of ripening tobacco. I am, in the deepest sense, colored.” From these fertile soils—of love, land, identity, family, and race—emerges The Home Place, a big-hearted, unforgettable memoir by ornithologist J. Drew Lanham.
Dating back to slavery, Edgefield County, South Carolina—a place “easy to pass by on the way to somewhere else”—has been home to generations of Lanhams. In The Home Place, readers meet these extraordinary people, including Drew himself, who over the course of the 1970s falls in love with the natural world around him. As his passion takes flight, however, he begins to ask what it means to be “the rare bird, the oddity”—to find joy and freedom in the same land his ancestors were tied to by forced labor, and then to be a black man in a profoundly white field.
By turns angry, funny, elegiac, and heartbreaking, The Home Place is a remarkable meditation on nature and belonging, at once a deeply moving memoir and riveting exploration of the contradictions of Black identity in the rural South—and in America today.
Articles & Audio
Read What’s In Print
• Sunset Camp, Sundown Town: An Interview with J. Drew Lanham – Terrain
• 9 Rules for the Black Birdwatcher – Orion Magazine
• 10 Rules for Going Feral – The Bitter Southerner
• Nine New Revelations for the Black American Bird-Watcher – Vanity Fair
• How Urbanites Misunderstand Wildlife – New York Times
• On The Home Place by J. Drew Lanham – The Kenyon Review
• Birding While Black with J. Drew Lanham – American Birding Association
Listen to Audio
• Episode 22: Prairie Warbler – This Is Love Podcast
• J. Drew Lanham: Pathfinding Through the Improbable – On Being
Selected Writings
• Read Two Poems – Poetry Northwest
• Read Field Note: Why I Write to Birds – Essay, Poetry Northwest
“Joy Is The Justice We Give Ourselves” (originally published in Emergence Magazine)
by J. Drew Lanham
we give ourselves.
It is Maya’s caged bird
sung free past the prison bars,
holding spirits bound—
without due process,
without just cause.
rights sprung up
through moss-soft ground—
water seeping sweet,
equality made clear
from sea
to shining sea,
north to south,
west to east.
crooked lies hammered straight,
whitewashed myths
wiped away.
Stone Mountain
—just stone.
Rushmore
—no more.
Give the eagles
their mountains back.
we can claim
right here,
right now.
No vengeful gods
craving prayer,
no tenth in tithes to pay,
no repenter’s cover charge—
no dying required to get in.
breaking through night’s remains,
bright shone new
on a shell-wracked shore;
a fresh tide-scrubbed world
redeems what was,
to is.Joy is on whimbrel’s wings;
the wedge in fast flight,
wandering curlews,
curved-beaks’ cries
stitching top of the world
to bottom.Joy is the soul stirred
underneath the journey,
gaze snagged on wonder,
not knowing final destination,
blessed as a witness,
moored to ground,
worshipful tears
dripped into grateful smile.Joy is the silent spring,
unquiet.
Rachel’s world not come to pass.
The season
dripping ripe full
of wood thrush song.Joy is all the Black birds,
flocked together,
too many to count,
too many to name,
every one different
from the next,
swirling in singularity
across amber-purpled sky.Joy is being loved
up close
for who we are.Joy is the last song,
drifting in
as dark curtains fall;
the sparrow’s vesper offering,
whistle lain down
in pine-templed woods,
requiem in me-minor—
church in a cathedral time built.
No stained glass.
No pulpit.
Altars everywhere.
Just listen.
Just look.Joy is the return,
the wandering warbler
landed in the backyard again,
from who knows where,
to rest,
to uplift lagging spirit.Joy is the healing,
broken dreams restored—
soaring.
Langston’s words
kettling higher
on hopes,
drifting ever upwards
on ragged-mid-lined rhyme,
dancing to syncopated verse.Joy is our lives mattering,
Blackness respected.
It is seeing my color,
hue not blinded by privilege,
the pious privilege
of claiming you don’t.Joy is the proper name,
with no “n” in the beginning
or “i” or double “g” or “e”
in the middle,
with an “r” rolled hateful
hard at the end.Joy is your truth
being the same behind my back
as to my face.Joy is the sharp eye
watching little brown sparrows,
and the kind one,
focused
on little brown children too.Joy is the ancestors
come before,
surviving the struggle,
staying strong
in the midst of withering storm;
from shackled ancestors
through Jim Crowed back doors
to gerrymandered chokehold now.
Still here in spite of it all.Joy is the payoff,
for those often down
but never out.Joy is the thriving,
a people who won’t die
in the midst of all this
dying;
the breaths,
ins followed by outs,
easy—
without begging for air
or asking your Mama’s ghost
to help.Joy is the drive
with no traffic stops,
with no taillights out,
with no tint technically too dark,
with no speed traps,
with no “yes sir, Officer sir.”
No hands at two and ten.
No wondering
where the registration is.Joy is the flashing blue light
passing by,
not meant for me.Joy is the good news,
without new dead names,
no chokeholds or murdering knees.
A night of sleep
in your very own bed
without shots in the dark
—no more not waking up,
full of lead.Joy is the morning jog
without being hunted down.Joy is the loss
we take to gain,
monuments to traitors
torn down,
lost causes finally buried,
never to be found again.Joy is the prairie,
where billowed cloud
and wild grass meet;
where the hawks glide
from there to here—
wherever;
its own choice to make,
no border crossing checks.Joy is the surrender,
to faith of push,
to trust in lift,
giving over to Toni’s command
to ride the air.
To float above
the trouble of this world
on a wish.Joy is my grandma’s hands,
grits through gnarled fingers tossed
on cold ground
to snowbirds she pitied—
a love for others
that became my own.Joy is the wild not tamed,
the rarest beast
with talons sharp,
or long teeth bared,
in the faraway place.Joy is the wayward weed
in the midtown sidewalk seam,
the one I choose to call
“wildflower”
because it dared
to not be planted,
to not be controlled.Joy is at the end,
a bruised purpling sky
when the night
comes again,
when luck is metered
by stars winking bright.Joy is the frogs calling,
amplexus orgying delights.Joy is the close call
that wasn’t close enough.
Death past by you.
Life stopping by.Joy is a heart still beating
even though
what could have been—
wasn’t.Joy is the knowing
that what this world
did not give—
it cannot take away.Joy is the moment
we grab in sweat-soaked
trembling hands,
that slides from possession,
stolen legally in bits and pieces
between yawning cracks
of despair.Joy is tears,
drops of salt water
fallen in the creases
of an upturned smile.Joy is the necessity
that must be lain by,
what’s kept hoarded in a sturdy cache
ever ready to apply.
Joy is the gift,
just desserts,
what we deserve
without asking
or constant demands—
the comfort that comes
when no one else
really cares.
Joy is the reward,
the salary already earned—
back pay
with four centuries’ interest
compounded daily.
At least eighty acres—
and two mules.
Joy is the day off,
just because.
Joy is the kiss of that one,
or the just verdict
delivered by twelve.
Joy is the everything,
the nothing.
The simple,
the complex.
Joy is the silly,
the serious,
the trivial.
The whale enormous,
the shrew’s small.
Joy is the murmuration,
then the stillness.
Joy is the inexplicable coincidence.
Joy is what was meant to be.
The mystery of impossibility happening.
The assurance of uncertainty.
Joy is my seeking.
Your being.
It is mine for the taking.
Ours to share.
More than enough to go around,
when it seems nowhere to be found.
Have yourself a heapin’ serving.
Have seconds. Or thirds.
‘Cause
joy is the justice
we must give ourselves.
