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Sports

James Prosek to Speak at Pequot Library

Meet the Author
James Prosek,
Eels: An Exploration, from New Zealand to the Sargasso, of the World's Most Amazing and Mysterious Fish
Sunday, November 20, 2011, 4:00 p.m.

Perkin Gallery Exhibit
James Prosek: Eels and Other Things
November 13 through December 31, 2011
Selections of original art from his children’s book, Bird, Butterfly, Eeel, and etchings from Eels. In collaboration with an exhibit of other work by James Prosek at the Bellarmine Museum of Fairfield University. 


They are the only fish that spawn in the middle of the ocean but spend their adult lives in freshwater. They can overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles, and even cross over land. They are revered as guardians and monster-seducers by New Zealand's Maori, and have inspired myths concerning breadfruit, banana, and coconut among the Pacific Island peoples. Often viewed with disgust in the West, they are a multibillion dollar business in the Asian food market—the Japanese eat them to beat summer fatigue. And they are often mistaken for snakes. They are eels—one of the world's most amazing and least understood fish (Yes, fish.)

James Prosek offers a fascinating tour through the life history and cultural associations of the freshwater eel, exploring its biology in streams and epic migrations in the ocean, its myth and lore, its mystery and beauty. Prosek travels the globe to tell the story of the eel—from New York to New Zealand; from Europe to the small island of Pohnpei Micronesia, where freshwater eels are worshipped by members of the eel clan. Along the way he introduces individuals whose lives are most connected with the eels' story—including fishermen, conservationists, and scientists seeking to uncover the eels' elusive home in the Sargasso Sea and their spawning places in other oceans of the world. Though eels have been here for hundreds of millions of years, populations of freshwater eels are rapidly declining, largely due to dams, overfishing, pollution, and perhaps even global climate change.

Illustrated with etchings by the author, Eels is a mesmerizing biography and history of this intriguing and mysterious creature. It is also a telling look at humanity, the will to persist, and the ever-changing relationship between man and the natural world.

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Artist, writer, activist, and Yale graduate James Prosek made his authorial debut at nineteen years of age with Trout: an Illustrated History (Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), which featured seventy of his watercolor paintings of the trout of North America. Prosek has shown his paintings with the Gerald Peters Gallery, New York and Santa Fe; Meredith Long Gallery, Houston; as well as with Wajahat/Ingrao, New York, the d.u.m.b.o. arts center, Brooklyn, Reynolds Gallery, Richmond, VA and the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, CT. Prosek has written for The New York Times and National Geographic Magazine and won a Peabody Award in 2003 for his documentary about traveling through England in the footsteps of Izaak Walton, the seventeenth-century author of The Compleat Angler. He co-founded a conservation initiative called World Trout in 2004 with Yvon Chouinard, the owner of Patagonia clothing company, which raises money for coldwater habitat conservation through the sale of T-shirts featuring trout paintings.

During November, Mr. Prosek will exhibit his eel etchings and some of his children's book art in the Perkin Gallery. Also, the Library will present a Children's Wall-Art program. Dates and times to be determined. Following the lecture, several of Mr. Prosek's books will be available for sale and to be signed, just in time for holiday giving!  These include Eels, Trout: an Illustrated History, Fly-fishing the 41st and his children’s books Bird, Butterfly and Eel, A Good Day’s Fishing and The Day My Mother Left Me.

Prosek is a curatorial affiliate of the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale, and a member of the board of the Yale Institute for Biospheric Studies. He is currently exhibiting at the Bellarmine Museum of Art at Fairfield University and lives in Easton.

Refreshments and book signing after the lecture.

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