Terry Tempest Williams

Passionate about environmental issues and free speech, Terry Tempest Williams is the author of more than a dozen books including the environmental literature classic, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place, as well as An Unspoken Hunger: Stories from the Field, and Leap. In her latest work, Mosaic: Finding Beauty in a Broken World (to be released by Pantheon, October 2008) Williams has created her most far-reaching and profoundly clarifying work to date. She considers the complex beauty of brokenness and the redemptive art of creating wholeness from fragments. Williams gives a riveting account of her trip to Rwanda—the shattering stories of death and resilience, bearing witness to the horror of neighbors slaughtering neighbors in an attempted annihilation. Mosaic been noted by Booklist as "scientific in exactitude, compassionate in receptivity, and rhapsodic in expression. Williams has constructed a beautiful mosaic of loss and renewal that affirms, with striking lucidity, the need for reverence for all of life."

To say she's led an interesting life would be an understatement. Williams has testified before Congress on women's health issues, worked as an artist in Rwanda, spent time in jail for acts of civil disobedience, and is the Annie Clark Tanner Scholar in Environmental Humanities at the University of Utah. Most recently, she has been named University of Wyoming's first Eminent Writer-in-Residence, one of University of Wyoming's Excellence Chairs in Higher Education Endowment. Her writing has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Orion Magazine, and in many anthologies worldwide. She is considered an essential voice in ecological consciousness and social change.