Donovan Hohn, whose book “Moby Duck” explores the true story of 28,800 yellow bath toys lost at sea, and the beachcombers, oceanographers, environmentalists and others including the author who searched for them, appears Sept. 8 on campus.

Hohn will appear in a 2 p.m. roundtable in the Hopwood Room, 1176 Angell Hall. He also will present a reading at 5:10 p.m. in the Helmet Stern Auditorium, U-M Museum of Art.

“Certainly I never expected to transit the Northwest Passage aboard a Canadian icebreaker in the company of scientists investigating the Arctic’s changing climate and polar bears lunching on seals,” Hohn writes in the prologue to the book, which also examines pollution of the seas. “Or to ride a high-speed ferry through the smoggy industrial backwaters of China’s Pearl River Delta, where, inside the Po Sing plastic factory, I would witness yellow pellets of polyethylene resin transmogrify into icons of childhood.”

“‘Moby-Duck’ is highly readable and, importantly, alive with a sense of intellectual curiosity,” according to a Boston Globe review.

A former English teacher and former senior editor of Harper’s, Hohn is the features editor of GQ. Hohn is winner of the Whiting Writers’ Award, a 2010 NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, Hopwood Awards in essay and poetry, and a Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Ocean Science Journalism Fellowship. His work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, Outside, and The Best Creative Nonfiction, Vol. 2.

Hohn’s appearance is sponsored by the Zell Visiting Writers Series, Lloyd Hall Scholars Program and the Program in the Environment.