Terry Tempest Williams

In the spring of 1983 Terry Tempest Williams learned that her mother was dying of cancer. That same season, The Great Salt Lake began to rise to record heights, threatening the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge and the herons, owls, and snowy egrets that Williams, a poet and naturalist, had come to gauge her life by. One event was nature at its most random, the other a by-product of rogue technology: Terry's mother, and Terry herself, had been exposed...

In her most original, provocative, and eloquently moving book since Refuge, Terry Tempest Williams gives us a luminous chronicle of finding beauty in a broken world. Always an impassioned and far-sighted advocate for a just relationship between the natural world and humankind, Williams has broadened her concerns over the past several years to include a reconfiguration of family and community in her search for a deeper understanding of what it means...

In these new essays, Williams explores the concept of erosion: of the land, of the self, of belief, of fear. She wrangles with the paradox of desert lands and the truth of erosion: What is weathered, worn, and whittled away through wind, water, and time is as powerful as what remains.

When artist Tom Curry first moved to Maine, his house overlooked a small, uninhabited island in Eggemoggin Reach. One day, while rowing across to the island, his boyhood fear of water came crashing in on him. So he decided to explore his fear head-on, and began painting the island "as a way to delve into my own darkness and seek a way back to the surface." That series of paintings, capturing the island in all lights, weathers, and moods, forms the...

The Illuminated Desert is a stunning dialogue between painting and prose by two daughters of the Colorado Plateau: Terry Tempest Williams and Chloe Hedden. This is more than an "abecedarian" or Alphabet Book. It is an exquisite rendering of the red rock canyons of southern Utah and the natural history that evokes a poetry of place. The audience for this book is the audience of the desert itself, beginning with the children and shared with adults in...

A spiritual meditation on Hieronymus Bosch's fifteenth-century Flemish masterpiece "The Garden of Delights," a triptych in which he depicts Paradise, Earthly Delights, and Hell.

A series of portraits showing how our lack of intimacy with the natural world has initiated a lack of intimacy with one another.

A simple introduction to the plant and animal life that flourishes in a marsh.

An intimate personal correspondence between two leading political artists at a time of crisis In the summer of 2020, their collaboration suddenly halted by COVID-19, photographer Fazal Sheikh (born 1965) and writer, educator and activist Terry Tempest Williams (born 1955) found themselves 5,000 miles apart, Sheikh in Zurich, Switzerland, Tempest Williams in Castle Valley, Utah. Like so many others, they communicated across the days and nights by...

In 1963, the Colorado River was dammed at Glen Canyon, creating Lake Powell while flooding a great natural wonder. Like thousands of environmentalists, Lee would like to see Lake Powell drained and Glen Canyon restored. She writes poetically and soulfully of her years as a river runner in the 1950s and of the beauty, solitude, and excitement of a wild place visited by very few. As a folksinger and Hollywood performer in the late 1950s and early 1960s,...