Terry Tempest Williams to be Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Fellow in Environmental Studies
The Environmental Studies Program is pleased to announce that Terry Tempest Williams will be the Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Fellow in Environmental Studies for 2014. Ms. Williams will be on campus October 1- October 3. In addition to the time that Ms. Williams will spend with students there will be a number of public events around her visit. More details will be available on our website soon.
Terry Tempest Williams has been called “a citizen writer,” a writer who speaks and speaks out eloquently on behalf of an ethical stance toward life. A naturalist and fierce advocate for freedom of speech, she has consistently shown us how environmental issues are social issues that ultimately become matters of justice. “So here is my question,” she asks, “what might a different kind of power look like, feel like, and can power be redistributed equitably even beyond our own species?”
Williams, like her writing, cannot be categorized. She has testified before Congress on women’s health issues, been a guest at the White House, has camped in the remote regions of Utah and Alaska wildernesses and worked as “a barefoot artist” in Rwanda.
Known for her impassioned and lyrical prose, Terry Tempest Williams is the author of the environmental literature classic, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place; An Unspoken Hunger: Stories from the Field; Desert Quartet; Leap; Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert; The Open Space of Democracy; and Finding Beauty in a Broken World. Her next book, When Women Were Birds, was published in Spring 2012 by Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus and Giroux. She is also a columnist for the magazine The Progressive. Williams is currently working on a new book titled My God Has Feet of Earth: Seven Pilgrimages in Seven National Parks (Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus and Giroux – Fall 2015).
In 2006, Williams received the Robert Marshall Award from The Wilderness Society, their highest honor given to an American citizen. She also received the Distinguished Achievement Award from the Western American Literature Association and the Wallace Stegner Award given by The Center for the American West. She is the recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in creative nonfiction.
Terry Tempest Williams is currently the Annie Clark Tanner Scholar in Environmental Humanities at the University of Utah and Provostial Scholar at Dartmouth College. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Orion Magazine, and numerous anthologies worldwide as a crucial voice for ecological consciousness and social change. She and her husband, Brooke Williams live in the desert and mountains of the American West.