Author
Conservationist
Animal Adventurer

Sy Montgomery, who has been described as “Part Indiana Jones and part Emily Dickinson” (The Boston Globe), shares her program Off the Beaten Track. It is an overview of the journey she has made from animal-loving writer to world explorer—all thanks to the teachers she’s met along the way. There’s a Buddhist saying: when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. Montgomery’s job as a writer is to recognize those teachers. They are all around us, but many turn out to look quite different from the typical classroom teacher: mountain gorillas, tarantulas, golden moon bears, pink dolphins, Amazonian shamans, man-eating tigers, in classrooms as vast as the Great Gobi of Mongolia, to the cloud forests of Papua New Guinea, to the Amazon. www.symontgomery.com.