Gary Snyder has been named the 2011 Religion and the Arts Award winner. He is a Pulitzer Prize winning poet, essayist, and environmental activist. Snyder has published eighteen books, which have been translated into more than twenty languages. Snyder’s work and thinking has been featured in video specials on BBC and PBS, and in every major national print organ. He is the recipient of multiple grants and awards, including the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Bollingen Prize for Poetry, American Poetry Society Shelley Memorial Award, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and in 1975 he won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. A key member of the mid-twentieth century San Francisco Renaissance literary movement, Snyder is currently professor emeritus at the University of California, Davis, and lives in Northern California. Born in San Francisco, Snyder has traveled the world, working as a logger, a carpenter, and on a steam-freighter crew, among other things. He has spent ongoing time in Japan, undertaking extensive training in the Rinzai school of Zen Buddhism. In announcing the 2008 Lilly Poetry Prize, chair of the jury selection Christian Wiman said, "Gary Snyder is in essence a contemporary devotional poet, though he is not devoted to any one god or way of being so much as to Being itself. His poetry is a testament to the sacredness of the natural world and our relation to it, and a prophecy of what we stand to lose if we forget that relation." Snyder and his ongoing work and words open up many conversations across the AAR constituency.

The award is selected by the Religion and the Arts Award Jury: Diane Apostolos-Cappadona, Norman Girardot, Sally M. Promey, and S. Brent Plate (Chair)