Celebrated author Barry Lopez, a seminal voice in contemporary American nature and environmental writing whose “Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape” won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 1986, will speak and read from his work at 7 p.m. Wednesday in the Art Department auditorium at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. The event is free and open to the public.

Lopez, an Oregon resident whose nonfiction and fiction works include “Of Wolves and Men,” “Field Notes” and “Light Action in the Caribbean,” has visited Hawaii several times to participate in cultural and literary conferences.

Commenting on the meaning of nature and landscape to human beings, he told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser in 2015, “I feel very strongly that by not going to traditional people we’re closing the door on more than half of what we should know.”

Sign up for writers’ retreat planned for May in Mokuleia

San Francisco writer Constance Hale, author of “Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wicked Good Prose,” the children’s book “‘Iwalani’s Tree” and a biography of kumu hula Patrick Makuakane, “The Natives Are Restless: A San Francisco Dance Master Takes Hula into the Twenty-First Century,” returns to her native North Shore to host her fifth annual writers’ retreat at Camp Mokuleia from May 7 to 12.

Registration is open for writers of all levels to take workshops in poetry and prose and enjoy an evening with Makuakane.

Information: campmokuleia.com/retreats/writers.