Author of Bellevue Reads book selection to lecture at BCC April 19

BELLEVUE, WASH.– Professor Michael Pollan, author of the Bellevue Reads and BCC Reads joint book selection, The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye view of the World, will present a free public lecture at Bellevue Community College April 19 – one of three events in April related to the two reading programs.

“An Evening With Michael Pollan” begins at 7 p.m. in Carlson Theatre on the college’s main campus (3000 Landerholm Circle S.E., Bellevue – off 148th Ave. S.E.). Pollan will discuss the power of plants and read from his new book, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals.

On April 11, Dr. Alfredo Gomes-Beloz, an ethnobotanist with the Center for Traditional Medicine in Olympia, will discuss “Ethnobotany as a Multidisciplinary Science.” The free public event begins at 7 p.m. at the Bellevue Regional Library (1111 - 110th Avenue Northeast, Bellevue).

At 7 p.m. on April 24, Stephanie Murphy, of BCC’s Life Sciences Informatics Center, will discuss genetic engineering in a free presentation entitled, “The Future of Foods,” at the Bellevue Regional Library.

The Bellevue Reads program, sponsored jointly by the Bellevue Regional Library and Bellevue Community College’s Center for Liberal Arts, encourages all of the library’s reading clubs to read one book in common each year.

BCC Reads is a Center for Liberal Arts project through which one book each year is incorporated in interdisciplinary fashion in BCC courses across the curriculum. About 2,000 BCC students are studying The Botany of Desire this year, in classes ranging from philosophy to botany to business.

In the past three years, the Bellevue Reads and BCC Reads programs have reinforced each other by sharing in the selection of one book between them.

Michael Pollan is Knight Professor of Journalism and director of the Knight Program in Science and Environmental Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine and author of A Place of My Own and Second Nature, in addition to The Botany of Desire and The Omnivore’s Dilemma.

For many years Pollan served as executive editor of Harper's magazine.

His writing has won numerous awards, including the Reuters/World Conservation Union Global Award in Environmental Journalism, the James Beard Award and the Genesis Award from the Humane Society of the United States.

Pollan’s appearance at BCC is supported by a grant from The Bullitt Foundation and Humanities Washington.

Pollan will spend two days with BCC students, lecturing in numerous classes.

For further information on Pollan’s April 19 lecture, go online to http://www.bcc.ctc.edu/liberalarts or call (425) 564-2550.

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