High Sierra of California

Woodcut and letterpress artist Tom Killion grew up in Marin County, California, on the slopes of Mt. Tamalpais, where the rugged scenery inspired him from an early age to create landscape prints strongly influenced by traditional Japanese woodblock prints. Along with publishing fine art letterpress books, Killion holds a PhD in African history from Stanford University and has taught history at several Bay Area universities. He is the founder of The Quail Press and his extensively illustrated books include 28 Views of Mount Tamalpais, The Coast of California, and Walls: A Journey Across Three Continents. Killion and Gary Snyder collaborated onm California's Wild Coast, The High Sierra of California, and Tamalpais Walking, all published by Heyday. You can find out more about his artwork at tomkillion.com.Gary Snyder is a poet, author, scholar, cultural critic, and professor emeritus of the University of California at Davis who has published sixteen books of poetry and prose, including The Gary Snyder Reader (1952–1998). He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His Turtle Island won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1975, and his book-length poem Mountains and Rivers Without End won the Bollingen Prize in poetry in 1997. In 2008 he was awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement.

"For a fibrillatingly lovely look at the High Sierra, that corner of the state that stays the same while all the rest of California convulses, the book to get this year is Tom Killion and Gary Snyder's art book, The High Sierra of California. It is to other coffee-table books what Jamaican Blue Mountain is to other coffee." —David Kipen, San Francisco Chronicle"Sometimes stately and solemn, sometimes mysterious and mystical, sometimes rollicking and even slightly ribald—[these prints] are the visual equivalent of Snyder’s poetry and the real glory of the book." —Jonathan Kirsch, Los Angeles Times Book Review"The combination of Killion's Sierra woodblock prints, Snyder's Sierra backpacking journals, Killion's selections from Muir's writing, and Killion's brief history of Snyder's Sierra life, makes this one of the great beauties in Sierra literature, maybe the finest of all in terms of quality of image and text, both individually and in combination." —Kim Stanley Robinson