From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Terry Tempest Williams (born September 8, 1955), is an American author, conservationist and activist. Williams’ writing is rooted in the American
West and has been significantly influenced by the arid landscape of her native Utah and its Mormon culture. Her work ranges from issues of ecology and wilderness preservation, to women's health, to exploring our relationship to culture and nature.
She has testified before Congress on women’s health, committed acts of civil disobedience in the years 1987 - 1992 in protest against nuclear testing in the Nevada Desert, and again, in March, 2003 in Washington,
D.C., with Code Pink, against the Iraq War. She has been a guest at the
White House, has camped in the remote regions of the Utah and Alaska wildernesses and worked as "a barefoot artist" in Rwanda.
Williams is the author of Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place;
An Unspoken Hunger: Stories from the Field; Desert Quartet; Leap; Red:
Patience and Passion in the Desert; and The Open Space of Democracy. Her book Finding Beauty in a Broken World was published in 2008 by Pantheon
Books.
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
Award for Nonfiction and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in creative nonfiction. Williams was featured in Ken Burns' PBS series The National
Parks: America's Best Idea (2009). In 2011, she received the 18th
International Peace Award given by the Community of Christ Church.[1]
Williams is currently the Annie Clark Tanner Scholar in Environmental
Humanities at the University of Utah and a columnist for the magazine The
Progressive. She has been a Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College where she continues to teach. She divides her time between Wilson,
Wyoming and Castle Valley, Utah, where her husband Brooke is field coordinator for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.
Early life, education, and work [edit source | editbeta]
Terry Tempest Williams was born in Corona, California, to Diane Dixon
Tempest and John Henry Tempest, III.
[1] Her father was serving in the
United States Air Force in Riverside, California, for two years. She grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah, within sight of Great Salt Lake.
Atomic testing at the Nevada Test Site (outside Las Vegas) between 1951 and 1962 exposed Williams’ family to radiation like many Utahns, which
Williams believes is the reason so many members of her family have been affected by cancer. By 1994, nine members of the Tempest family had had mastectomies, and seven had died of cancer.
[2] Some of the family members affected by cancer included Williams’ own mother and grandmother and brother.
In 1978, Williams graduated from the University of Utah with a degree in
English and a minor in biology, followed by a Master of Science degree in environmental education in 1984. Williams met her husband Brooke
Williams in 1974 while working part-time at Sam Weller's Bookstore, a Salt
Lake City bookstore, where he was a customer. The two married six months after their first meeting and began their life together working at the Teton Science School in Grand Teton National Park. After graduating from college, Williams worked as a teacher in Montezuma Creek, Utah, on the Navajo Reservation. She worked at the Utah Museum of Natural
History from 1986-96, first as curator of education and later as naturalistin-residence.
Writing career [edit source | editbeta]
Williams published her first book, The Secret Language of Snow in 1984. A children’s book written with Ted Major, her mentor at the Teton Science

School, it received a National Science Foundation Book Award. Over the next few years, she published three other books: Pieces of White Shell: A
Journey to Navajo Land (1984, illustrated by Clifford Brycelea, a Navajo artist), Between Cattails (1985, illustrated by Peter Parnall), and Coyote’s
Canyon, (1989, with photographs by John Telford).
[3]
In 1991, Williams' memoir, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and
Place was published by Pantheon Books. The book interweaves memoir and natural history, explores her complicated relationship to Mormonism, and recounts her mother's diagnosis with ovarian cancer along with the concurrent flooding of the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, a place special to Williams since childhood. The book's widely anthologized epilogue, The Clan of One-Breasted Women, explores whether the high incidence of cancer in her family might be due to their status as downwinders during the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission's above-ground nuclear testing in the 1950s and 60s. Refuge received the 1991 Evans
Biography Award from the Mountain West Center for Regional Studies at
Utah State University.
[4] and the Mountain-Plains Booksellers Creative
Nonfiction Book Award in 1992.
In 1995, when the United States Congress was debating issues related to the Utah wilderness, Williams and writer Stephen Trimble edited the collection, Testimony: Writers Speak On Behalf of Utah Wilderness, an effort by twenty American writers to sway public policy. A copy of the book was given to every member of Congress.
[5] On September 18, 1996,
President Bill Clinton at the dedication of the new Grand Staircase-
Escalante National Monument, held up this book and said, "This made a difference." [5]
Williams’ writing on ecological and social issues has appeared in The New
Yorker, The New York Times, and Orion magazine, among others. She has been published in numerous environmental, feminist, political, and literary anthologies. She has also collaborated in the creation of fine art books with photographers Emmet Gowin, Richard Misrach, Debra Bloomfield,
Meridel Rubenstein, Rosalie Winard, and Edward Riddell.
Notes [edit source | editbeta]
1.
^ Tredinnick, Mark. The land's wild music: encounters with Barry
Lopez, Peter Matthiessen, Terry Tempest Williams, & James Galvin.
Trinity University Press, 2005.
2.
^ Mother Jones Magazine, Mar-Apr 1994.
3.
^ Books
4.
^ "Previous Winners - Evans Biography Award" (PDF). Mountain
West Center for Regional Studies at Utah State University.
Retrieved 2008-10-23.
5.
^ a b Summer, David Thomas. Testimony, Refuge, and the Sense of
Place—A Conversation with Terry Tempest Williams
References [edit source | editbeta]



 Clark, Monette Tangren (Literary Assistant to Terry Tempest
Williams) Moab Poets & Writers
 Anderson, Lorraine, John P. O'Grady, and Scott Slovic, eds.

Literature and the Environment. New York: Longman, 1999.
Kupfer, David. "Terry Tempest Williams Interview". The
Progressive Online. Retrieved 2009-03-25.
"Biography". Retrieved 2009-03-25.

"Bibliography". 2008-09-23. Retrieved 2009-04-02.
Ives, Susan. "A Conversation with Terry Tempest Williams". Land &
People. Retrieved 2009-03-22.
Williams, Terry Tempest. "World Authors 1990-1995". Biography
Reference Bank (H. W. Wilson). 1999. Retrieved 2009-04-02.
External links [edit source | editbeta]


Coyote Clan - Terry Tempest Williams' Home Page
Works by or about Terry Tempest Williams in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
 Whole Terrain link to Williams' articles published in Whole Terrain
 Tempest: "6 Months Since BP Oil Spill, Where Is Our Outrage?" -
 video interview by Democracy Now!
Terry Tempest Williams interviewed on The Lit Show