JACK DAVIS LECTURE…SATURDAY…MARCH 14 …LIBRARY

March 10, 2020

On Saturday, March 14, the Cedar Key Public Library and Friends proudly present Dr. Jack Davis, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and professor of history at the University of Florida, who will talk about his award-winning book The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea. The event will take place at the Library at 10:30 a.m.

Davis's lecture, part of the library's annual lecture series, will explore the Gulf as a presence far bigger than events, such as the oil spill or hurricanes, may have made it seem. "I wanted to restore it, to show people that the Gulf is more than an oil spill, It's got a rich, natural history connected to Americans, and it's not integrated into the larger American historical narrative. That's a wrong I wanted to correct," Davis said, during an interview at the time of his receiving the Pulitzer.

He is professor of history and the Rothman Family Chair in Humanities specializing in environmental history and sustainability studies at UF, the faculty of which he joined in 2003. Prior to that, he taught at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and Eckerd College, and in 2002 was a Fulbright scholar at the University of Jordan in Amman.

The Gulf was a New York Times notable book for 2017, made many other "best" book lists, in addition to winning the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for History. The book also was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction and winner of the Kirkus Prize for nonfiction. In April 2019, Dr. Davis received the Andrew Carnegie fellowship award, as one of 32 fellows out of 300 nominations to be selected for the award. His current book project is Bird of Paradox: How the Bald Eagle Saved the Soul of America, which is supported by the Carnegie fellowship.

Of Davis's Gulf book, Philip Connors wrote in The New York Times review, "In Davis's hands, the story reads like a watery version of the history of the American West."

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