Pillars of Creation

“Richard Panek has introduced a most complex undertaking within a most complex science and made it all so very simple…Panek seamlessly ties together the history, the people, and the technological advances to form an unforgettable telling…it’s no wonder that he has become one of the country’s best scientific communicators.”

Richard Panek is the author of numerous books including The 4% Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality, which won the American Institute of Physics communication award and was longlisted for the Royal Society Prize for Science Books. The recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation (in Science Writing) and the New York Foundation for the Arts (in Literary Nonfiction), as well as an Antarctic Artists and Writers grant from the National Science Foundation, he is also the co-author with Temple Grandin of The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum, a New York Times bestseller. His own books have been translated into sixteen languages, and his writing about science and culture has appeared in Scientific American, the New York Times, Discover, Smithsonian, Natural History, Esquire, Outside, and many other publications; his short fiction has appeared in Ploughshares and won a PEN Syndicated Fiction Award. He is on the faculty of the MFA Writing Program at Goddard College, and he also teaches creative writing at Barnard College and Johns Hopkins University. He lives in New York City.