One of California's intellectual and cultural treasures, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gary Snyder, will be awarded the California State Library Gold Medal for Excellence in the Humanities and Science Sunday, June 17, at the University of California, Davis.

Snyder will be presented the medal at 9 a.m. in Recreation Hall by State Librarian Kevin Starr. The award will be given at commencement ceremonies for the UC Davis College of Letters and Science, where Snyder is a professor of English.

"Gary Snyder is one of the literary giants of our time," Starr said. "He writes about the natural world in the spirit of John Clare and William Wordsworth, mediating between the wild and the human. His words will outlive our dams, freeway overpasses, and skyscrapers. He is a treasure not just of California but the world."

The California State Library Gold Medal is a fairly new honor authorized by the Legislature in 1996 for works in the humanities and sciences that have enriched the state. Because of the state library's role in identifying significant contributions to California's intellectual, cultural and scientific knowledge, the Legislature granted it the role of awarding the medal.

Snyder is being honored for his lifetime body of work -- 18 books of poetry and prose. He is the second person to receive the medal; the first was jazz musician Dave Brubeck, who was honored at the University of the Pacific commencement in Stockton last year.

Most recently Snyder has gained international renown for his 1996 "Mountains and Rivers Without End," a booklength poem he started 40 years previously. The one long poem is composed of shorter poems that take the reader on travels from the Pacific Northwest to Japan to Manhattan to the Southwest. The poems explore travel as a metaphor for impermanence, for both humans and the landscape.

The same year Snyder published "Mountains," he was awarded with Yale University's Bollingen Poetry Prize, considered by many the top poetry honor in the nation, and the Robert Kirsch Lifetime Achievement Award from the Los Angeles Times.

"No Nature," a volume of selected poems by Snyder, was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1992. His book "Turtle Island" won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1975.

He also has received the Buddhism Transmission Award given by Japan's Bukkyo Dendo Kyokai Foundation and the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund writer's award.

Snyder is a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

His most recently published book is the 1999 "The Gary Snyder Reader (1952-1998)," which includes prose, essays, poetry, journals and letters.

Born in 1930, Snyder graduated from Reed College with a degree in literature and anthropology. He was a member of the Beat poets when he lived in San Francisco in the late 1950s. Later, because of his interest in Zen Buddhism, he moved to Japan to live and study for 12 years.

The 71-year-old Snyder has lived in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada near Grass Valley since 1970. Before joining UC Davis in 1986, he was a full-time writer and traveling lecturer for 16 years. He has continued to write and lecture while teaching poetry to graduate students through the UC Davis English department's creative writing program, as well as poetry workshops and literature classes for undergraduates.

He also co-founded and teaches in the nature and culture major at UC Davis, an interdisciplinary set of studies offering students the exploration of the complex relationships existing between human cultures and the natural world.