Sedona, AZ: Terry Tempest Williams, well-known writer and naturalist whose writing explores relationships between environmental issues and social justice, will be reading selections from her new book Finding Beauty in a Broken World on February 9 at 7:30 p.m. at High Country Conference Center on the campus of Northern Arizona University.
Hosted by the Grand Canyon Trust and the Museum of Northern Arizona, the public is cordially invited to attend this free literary event.
Williams is the recipient of the Grand Canyon Trust’s Trees Fellowship, which was established to foster broader public appreciation of canyon country conservation challenges by publicly exploring the steps society must take to sustain the health of this magnificent part of the world.
Always an advocate for a just relationship between the natural world and humankind, Williams has broadened her concerns to include a reconfiguration of family and community in her search for a deeper understanding of what it means to be human in an era of physical and spiritual fragmentation.
Williams is a Utah native, descended from five or six generations of Mormon pioneers. “I write through my biases of gender, geography, and culture,” she says. “I am a woman whose ideas have been shaped by the Great Basin and Colorado Plateau.”
Williams is perhaps best known for her book Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place (Pantheon, 1991), in which she chronicles the epic rise of the Great Salt Lake and the flooding of the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge in 1983, alongside her mother's diagnosis with ovarian cancer, believed to be caused by radioactive fallout from the nuclear tests in the Nevada desert in the 1950s and 60s. Refuge is now regarded as a classic in American nature writing, a testament to loss and the earth's healing grace.
Williams’ other books include Red: Patience and Passion in the Desert, 2001, a collection of essays; An Unspoken Hunger; Desert Quartet: An Erotic Landscape; Coyote's Canyon; and Pieces of White Shell: A Journey to Navajoland. She is also the author of two children's books: The Secret Language of Snow; and Between Cattails.
In 2004 Terry Tempest Williams published The Open Space of Democracy, in which she defined how we can break down the partisanship and polarization in our society so that we can come together to solve the political and environmental problems which threaten our democracy and our land.
Contact Darcy Allen at Grand Canyon Trust at 928-774-7488, or dallen@grandcanyontrust.org; or Cheryl Blume at the Museum of Northern Arizona at 928-774-5213, ext. 219, or cblume@mna.mus.az.us for more information on the event.
Article courtesy of Michele Bourgeois Mountain
Posted January 31, 2009.
