Jack Nisbet

Spokane-based teacher and naturalist Jack Nisbet grew up in North Carolina and moved to eastern Washington in 1971. His writing explores the intersection of human and natural history, and connects the greater Northwest with events and phenomena around the globe. Nisbet’s works include Purple Flat Top; Singing Grass, Burning Sage; Visible Bones; and two books about the pioneer fur trader and cartographer David Thompson: Sources of the River and The Mapmaker’s Eye. Nisbet’s most recent project, The Collector, follows Scottish naturalist David Douglas through the landscape and cultures of the New World.

Together these books have won the Murray Morgan Prize, Washington Governor’s Award, the American Library Association’s Best of the Best University Press Publications, ForWord’s silver award for environmental publications, and annual best-of lists from The Seattle Times, Idaho Librarians, and Washington State Libraries. Most recently, the Pacific Northwest Bookseller’s Association named The Collector as one of their 2010 Books of the Year.

Nisbet has taught workshops on writing and natural history in public school, college, university, and elderhostel settings in seven states and two Canadian provinces.
For the past decade, he has written a column called Boundaries for North Columbia Monthly magazine. Other freelance venues that he has appeared in include Orion, the Pacific Northwest Inlander, the Seattle Weekly, Columbia, We Proceeded On, Oceans, and historylink.org.

Nisbet has also consulted on a dozen documentary films and museum exhibits, including the acclaimed Mapmaker’s Eye show that opened at the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture in Spokane in 2005 and continues to tour as a traveling exhibit throughout the greater Northwest. Nisbet and his wife Claire are currently assembling an exhibition on The Worlds of David Douglas that will open at the Washington State History Museum in 2013.

For more about Jack and his works, go to http://www.jacknisbet.com/