Artist, writer, activist, and Yale graduate James Prosek made his authorial debut at nineteen years of age with Trout: An Illustrated History(Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), which featured seventy of his watercolor paintings of the trout of North America. Prosek is a regular contributor to the New York Times and won a Peabody Award in 2003 for his documentary about traveling through England in the footsteps of Izaak Walton, the seventeenth-century author of The Compleat Angler.He co-founded a conservation initiative called World Trout in 2004 with Yvon Chouinard, the owner of Patagonia clothing company, which raises money for coldwater habitat conservation through the sale of T-shirts featuring trout paintings.