Short Biography:
Gary Clark is a Dean at North Harris College and author of " Nature," a weekly column in the Houston Chronicle. His writing has been published in a variety of state and national magazines including AAA Journeys, Birds & Bloom, Birder?s World, Living Bird, Rivers, Texas Highways, Texas Parks & Wildlife, Texas Wildlife, and Women in the Outdoors. Gary wrote the text for the book, Texas Wildlife Portfolio (Farcountry Press, 2004), and is a contributing author in the book, Pride of Place: A Contemporary Anthology of Texas Nature Writing. (University of North Texas Press, 2006.) He has won seven writing awards, and he is the recipient of the 2004 Excellence in Media Award from the Houston Audubon Society.

Gary has been active in the birding community for over 30 years. He founded the Piney Woods Wildlife Society in 1982 and founded the Texas Coast Rare Bird Alert in1983. He served as President of the Houston Audubon Society from 1989 to 1991 and purchased the North American Rare Bird Alert (NARBA) for Houston Audubon in 1990. He currently serves on the Board of Directors for the Gulf Coast Bird Observatory and Board of Advisors for the Houston Audubon Society.

Critical Description of Work:
In my feature stories about nature, I seek to awaken the soul of an audience to a world of nature with which they may have lost touch. I want to rekindle the joy and wonder people felt as a child when they first saw a bird, a butterfly, or a squirrel. I attempt to make my writing resonate with the deep ancestral feeling toward the natural world, a feeling that draws people to look for something abiding in nature. In as many cases as possible, I want my stories to be personal to the audience, a kind of epistle telling of my adventures and explorations in the world of nature. I believe that if my readers can see nature through my eyes---the eyes of a person brimming with curiosity about nature---then they can be enticed to look at nature through their own eyes, to re-discover their own wonderment about critters like birds, moths, and dragonflies. For example, I do not detail mere facts about the phenomenal event of bird migration. I write about the joy of witnessing bird migration on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, folding in a few facts to underscore the joy. It is my way of plucking a resonant chord in my audience, a chord for nature that may have been still too long.