Lopez was born in Port Chester, New York and raised in Southern California and New York City. He attended grade school at Our Lady of Grace, where the family lived. He attended the University of Notre Dame, earning undergraduate and graduate degrees there in 1966 and 1968. He also attended New York University and the University of Oregon. His essays, short stories, reviews and opinion pieces began appearing in 1966. Until 1981, he was also a landscape photographer. He regularly collaborates with other artists and writers and is active in national and international efforts toward reconciliation. He has traveled to nearly 80 countries and in 2002 was elected a Fellow of the Explorers Club. Lopez has been described as "the nation's premier nature writer" by the San Francisco Chronicle. In his non-fiction, he frequently examines the relationship between human culture and the physical landscape, while in his fiction he addresses issues of intimacy, ethics and identity. He has written introductions for and guest edited a number of books and anthologies, including Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape, with Debra Gwartney, The Best American Spiritual Writing 2005, and The Future of Nature. In 2008, he guest edited two volumes of the journal Manoa with Frank Stewart, Maps of Reconciliation and Gates of Reconciliation. Lopez along with Peter Matthiessen, Terry Tempest Williams, and James Galvin, was hailed in Mark Tredinnick's The Land's Wild Music in which Tredinnick analyzed how the landscape nourished and informed Lopez's writing. An archive of Lopez's manuscripts and other work has been established at Texas Tech University, where he is the university's Visiting Distinguished Scholar. Lopez lives near Finn Rock on the McKenzie River in western Oregon.
Fiction
Desert Notes: Reflections in the Eye of a Raven
Giving Birth to Thunder, Sleeping with His Daughter
River Notes: The Dance of Herons
Winter Count, Distinguished Recognition Award, Friends of American Writers
Of Wolves and Men, National Book Award finalist, John Burroughs Medal, Christopher Medal, Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award
Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape, National Book Award, Christopher Medal, Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award, Oregon Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award finalist
Crossing Open Ground
The Rediscovery of North America
About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory
Apologia
Horizon
Anthology
Vintage Lopez. Collected essays and short stories.
Books edited by Barry Lopez
Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape, edited by Barry Lopez and Debra Gwartney. San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 2010.
The Future of Nature: Writing on a Human Ecology from Orion, selected and introduced by Barry Lopez. Milkweed Editions, 2007.
His writing has appeared in Harper's, Orion, The New York Times Magazine, Granta, The Sun, and Manoa, and in Best American Essays, Best American Spiritual Writing, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and the "best of" collections from Outside, National Geographic, The Paris Review, Witness, and The Georgia Review.
