Lewis Hyde is the author of The Gift, Trickster Makes This World and, most recently, A Primer for Forgetting. A MacArthur Fellow and former director of undergraduate creative writing at Harvard University, Hyde taught writing and American literature for many years at Kenyon College. Now retired, he lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with his wife, the writer Patricia Vigderman. Hyde is on the board of directors of MacDowell and a founding director of the Creative Capital Foundation.
While at MacDowell, Hyde worked through 25 years of notebooks related to his interest in searching for butterflies, extracting key topics and sketching the shape for a proposed book. His most recent publication on the topic was a 2025 essay for Harper’s Magazine, “The Geological Sublime: Butterflies, Deep Time & Climate Change.”
