For more than thirty years, Michael Pollan has been writing books and articles about the places where the human and natural worlds intersect: on our plates, in our farms and gardens, and in our minds. Pollan is the author of eight books, six of which have been New York Times bestsellers; three of them (including his latest, How to Change Your Mind) were immediate #1 New York Times bestsellers. His newest book, This is Your Mind on Plants, an exploration into the powerful human attraction to psychoactive plants and the taboos we place on them, was a New York Times bestseller and one of the Washington Post’s 50 Notable Works of Nonfiction of 2021.
A contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine since 1987, Pollan’s writing has received numerous awards, including the James Beard Award for best magazine series in 2003; the John Burroughs prize (for the best natural history essay in 1997); the QPB New Vision Award (for his first book, Second Nature); the 2000 Reuters-I.U.C.N. Global Award for Environmental Journalism for his reporting on genetically modified crops; and the 2003 Humane Society of the United States’ Genesis Michael Pollan Bestselling Author & Sustainable Food Advocate “Michael Pollan [is a] distin - guished author and designated repository for the nation’ s food conscience.” — New York Times Photo: Tabitha Soren Award for his writing on animal agriculture; the James Beard Foundation Leadership Award (2014); the Nierenberg Prize for Science in the Public Interest by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (2014); the Washburn Award for “outstanding contribution to public understanding of science” from the Boston Museum of Science; the 2013 Premio Nonino, an international literary prize; the 2015 Washington University Humanities Medal, and the Lennon Ono Grant for Peace in 2010. In 2009 Pollan was named one of the top 10 “New Thought Leaders” by Newsweek magazine. In 2010 he was chosen by Time Magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world.
Pollan has received an honorary doctorate from the University of Gastronomic Science and in 2015- 16 was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. Pollan retired as the John S. and James L. Knight Professor of Journalism at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, the director of the Knight Program in Science and Environmental Journalism, and co-founder, along with Dacher Keltner and others, of the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics. In 2017, he was appointed Professor of the Practice of Non-fiction at Harvard and the university’s first Lewis Chan Lecturer in the Arts. He continues to lecture widely on food, agriculture, health, and psychedelic science.
Michael Pollan, who was born in 1955, grew up on Long Island, and was educated at Bennington College, Oxford University, and Columbia University, from which he received a Master’s in English. He lives in the Bay Area with his wife, the painter Judith Belzer.