Terry Tempest Williams is a naturalist, environmentalist, and award-winning author. She is a recipient of the Lannan Literary Fellowship in creative nonfiction and the 1997 Guggenheim Fellowship, and served as naturalist-in-residence at the Utah Museum of Natural History. In 2014, on the 50th Anniversary of the Wilderness Act, Ms. Williams received the Sierra Club’s John Muir Award honoring a distinguished record of leadership in American conservation. She divides her time between Castle Valley, Utah, and Moose, Wyoming. She is the author of many books including Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place (Pantheon 1991), Red: Patience and Passion in the Desert (Vintage Books 2002), An Unspoken Hunger: Stories from the Field (Vintage Books 1995) , Leap (Vintage 2001), The Open Space of Democracy (The Orion Society 2004), Finding Beauty in a Broken World (Pantheon 2008), When Women Were Birds (Sarah Crichton Books: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2012), The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America’s National Parks (Sarah Crichton Books, Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2016) and Erosion: Essays of Undoing (Sarah Crichton Books, Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2019)

 Interview Date: 5/5/2012    Tags: MP3, Terry Tempest Williams, journaling, her mother's journals, grief, Mormon women write, full silence, women's friendships, matriarchal line, Women’s Studies, Writing