Wendell E. Berry, the poet, novelist, and essayist who is known for his meditations on our relation and responsibilities to nature, will deliver the Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Humanities announced today. The lecture, the federal government’s top honor in the humanities, carries a $10,000 honorarium. It recognizes a writer whom the endowment’s chairman, Jim Leach, described as “a 21st-century Henry David Thoreau.”

The April 23 lecture, titled “It All Turns on Affection,” will discuss man’s interaction with nature. Mr. Berry, 77, a Kentucky native who has lived and worked a 125-acre farm near Port Royal, Ky., since 1965, has written more than 40 books. Many have touched on America’s agrarian past and present, and have criticized industrial farming and mountaintop-removal coal mining. In 2010 he pulled his personal papers from the University of Kentucky, his alma mater, over its ties to the coal industry.

He has also served as a visiting professor at several colleges, including Bucknell, New York, and Stanford Universities.