JEFFREY A. LOCKWOOD

We (eight Americans and seven Moroccans, along with a French documentarian and a Japanese funder) pulled off a performance of Locust: The Opera in Agadir, Morocco, at the 13th International Congress of Orthopterology (the scientists who study crickets, katydids, grasshoppers and, of course, locusts). Everything went just as expected, meaning that almost nothing went as planned. My years of international ecological research paid off in terms of anticipating surprises and emb

Here is an intriguing email and my response (both somewhat abridged, so let me know if you’d like the full versions). I showed the controversial image in question (Grasshopper in Cyberspace, Galina Lukshina, 2003) during a university presentation about my writing, when discussing the Riley mystery series. CONCERN: Your seminar was fascinating [but] the image of the woman on her back in a very sexualized position, with the insect head twisted around is not appropriate. Yes, p

Few people grasp the complexities of science and still fewer engage the richness of opera—so why not combine the two?! This seems absurd, but the venture is also ridiculously intriguing. I teamed up with Dr. Anne Guzzo—an acclaimed composer in the Department of Music—to propose writing and producing a chamber opera about the Rocky Mountain locust. If you think that’s remarkable, what’s really amazing is that we received funding. Our pitch was creative and maybe even plausi

According to Thomas Edison, “Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.” And in my experience writing is about 10% drafting and 90% revising. What I didn’t fully appreciate was how much redoing and undoing goes into art—or at least what is required to get a book cover “just right.” My nonfiction books involved sending off a few images for a cover, which the publisher’s graphic artist pretty much ignored. And then I’d get a virtually final cover im