“Only by restoring the broken connections can we be healed. Connection is health. And what our society does its best to disguise from us is how ordinary, how commonly attainable, health is. We lose our health—and create profitable diseases and dependences—by failing to see the direct connections between living and eating, eating and working, working and loving.”

American novelist, poet, essayist, environmental activist, cultural critic and farmer

Wendell Berry is an American novelist, poet, essayist, environmental activist, cultural critic, and farmer, closely associated with rural Kentucky. He is known for writing across fiction, poetry, and essays about agrarian life, rural community, and the ties between people, land, and work. His agrarian ideas appear strongly in essays such as The Unsettling of America and The Gift of Good Land. He also returned often to the imagined world of Port William in novels and stories including A Place on Earth, Jayber Crow, and That Distant Land, where the culture and economy of rural life are central.