Barry Lopez Recording Studio

This page is a part of Named Spaces at Literary Arts, highlighting authors and individuals honored through named spaces at our headquarters at 716 SE Grand Avenue, Portland, OR. Learn more and explore the full gallery here.

Artwork courtesy of Jonathan Hill.

Barry Lopez Recording Studio, basement

This space supported by ​Marcia & Tom Wood

Barry Lopez (1945–2020) was born in Port Chester, New York, and later settled in Oregon, where he spent most of his life as a writer. Widely regarded as one of the most important writers on the natural world, Lopez explored humanity’s relationship with nature through works such as Arctic Dreams (1986), which won the National Book Award. His writing combined scientific inquiry, ethics, and storytelling, reflecting a lifelong concern for empathy, responsibility, and hope. 

 During his lifetime, Lopez traveled to more than eighty countries and worked with researchers and scientists in some of the most remote and challenging landscapes on the planet, including the High Arctic, Antarctica, Sumatra after the 2004 tsunami, Afghanistan, and Australia’s Western Desert.