Wendell Berry, author, farmer and intellectual, to give prestigious Jefferson Lecture tonight; online

Poet, essayist, novelist, farmer and conservationist Wendell Berry will deliver the 2012 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities tonight at 7:30 at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. The National Endowment for the Humanities will be video-streaming the lecture live. The annual lecture is the most prestigious honor the federal government bestows for intellectual achievement in the humanities. (Photo by Pam Spaulding)

Berry, of Port Royal, Ky., has been described as a "21st century Henry David Thoreau" and has "spent his career meditating on our relationship and responsibility to the land and community," according to the NEH website. He has written more than 40 books of poems, essays, short stories and novels. His Jefferson Lecture, "It All Turns on Affection," inspired by a passage from E.M. Forester's Howard's End, will focus on our ties to place and the environment as expressed through literature and history. Berry is delivering the 41st lecture.

For more information about Berry and the lecture, click here. The live-stream will be available here.