Dalton State College will welcome author James Howard Kunstler on Thursday, October 26, as a guest speaker. The event, which begins at 7:30 p.m. in the auditorium of Memorial Hall, is sponsored by the Fine Arts and Lecture Series and is free and open to the public.

Kunstler is the author of The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Manmade Landscape and The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the 21st Century.

In addition, Kunstler has also authored eight other books, including the novels Maggie Darling, The Halloween Ball, and An Embarrassment of Riches.

“I wrote The Geography of Nowhere because I believe a lot of people share my feelings about the tragic landscape of highway strips, parking lots, housing tracts, mega-malls, junked cities, and ravaged countryside that makes up the everyday environment where most Americans live and work,” Kunstler says.

His newest book, The Long Emergency, deals with the challenges posed by the “coming permanent global oil crisis, climate change, and other converging catastrophes of the 21st Century.”

Born in New York City in 1948, Kunstler graduated from the State University of New York and worked as a reporter and a feature writer for a number of newspapers and was a staff writer for Rolling Stone Magazine.

He has lectured at such colleges and universities as Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Cornell, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Virginia.

For more information about the lecture, please call 706-272-4469.