Best-selling author and poet, Aimee Nezhukumatathil will discuss the importance of maintaining wonder and curiosity in our lives, what's at stake when we ignore wonder, and how contagious sharing our moments of wonder can be. This lecture will be followed by a book signing with books available for purchase.

Nezhukumatathil authored the illustrated collection of nature essays, World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks & Other Astonishments – which garnered praise including Barnes and Noble Book of the Year, New York Times Bestseller, Kirkus Prize Finalist for Nonfiction and An NPR Best Book of 2020. She also wrote four poetry collections including Oceanic. Her most recent chapbook, Lace & Pyrite, features epistolary garden poems with the poet, Ross Gay.

Additional honors include a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pushcart Prize, a Mississippi Arts Council grant, and being named a Guggenheim Fellow in poetry. In addition to serving as poetry editor for Sierra magazine, the story-telling arm of The Sierra Club, she is professor of English and Creative Writing in the University of Mississippi’s MFA program. Her forthcoming book of food essays, Bite By Bite, releases in May 2024.

The keynote address will cap off a month of Loyola faculty workshops, student-faculty colloquia and activities following the World of Wonders text, in conjunction with the theme of “Celebrating Nature.” Since 1986, Loyola’s Humanities Center has sponsored the annual Humanities Symposium – a series of events related to a particular text for students, faculty, friends of the University and the Baltimore community. The main goal has been to get a large portion of the Loyola community to read the same work at roughly the same time and to be engaged in a common inquiry. Keynote speakers have included Elie Wiesel, Toni Morrison, Tracy Chevalier, Czeslaw Milosz, Phil Klay, Vice Admiral James B. Stockdale and William Bennett.