Terry Tempest Williams

Terry Tempest Williams (born 8 September 1955), is an American writer, educator, conservationist, and activist. Williams' writing is rooted in the American West and has been significantly influenced by the arid landscape of Utah. Her work focuses on social and environmental justice ranging from issues of ecology and the protection of public lands and wildness, to women's health, to exploring our relationship to culture and nature. She writes in the genre of creative nonfiction and the lyrical essay.
Early life, education, and work
Terry Tempest Williams was born in Corona, California, to Diane Dixon Tempest and John Henry Tempest, III. Her father served 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 (especially those living in the southern part of the state), 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. Some of the family members affected by cancer included Williams' own mother, grandmother, and brother.
Williams met her husband Brooke Williams in 1974 while working part-time at 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.
In 1976 Williams was hired to teach science at Carden School of Salt Lake City (since renamed Carden Memorial School).
She often clashed with the conservative couple that led the school over her unorthodox teaching methods and environmental politics, but she respected their gift of teaching through storytelling and prized her five years there.
"Teaching helped me find my voice," she later wrote. "The challenge was to impart large ecological concepts to young burgeoning minds in a language that wasn't polemical, but woven into a compelling story."
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. 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 naturalist-in-residence.
Williams 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 was featured Stephen Ives's PBS documentary series The West (1996) and in Ken Burns' PBS series The National Parks: America's Best Idea (2009).
In 2003, the University of Utah awarded Williams an honorary doctorate. That year she also co-founded the University's acclaimed Environmental Humanities master's degree program, where she taught for thirteen years and was the Annie Clark Tanner Teaching Fellow. In February 2016, the University approached Williams about contract revisions days after she and her husband successfully bid on a 1,120 acre oil and gas lease to protest federal energy policies in environmentally sensitive areas of Utah. According to The Salt Lake Tribune, the Williams' "gesture ... angered Utah's political brokers".
The University denied that the contract issue was related to the oil and gas lease or Williams' other activism. Nevertheless in an April 25, 2016, letter to the University's associate vice president for faculty she wrote: "My fear is that universities, now under increased pressure to raise money, are being led by corporate managers rather than innovative educators." Williams resigned from the University of Utah in late April 2016, after six weeks of contract negotiations she described as "humiliating".
Terry Tempest Williams is currently Writer-in-Residence at the Harvard Divinity School. Her courses that she is teaching include "Finding Beauty in a Broken World" and "Apocalyptic Grief and Radical Joy." She is working with the Planetary health Alliance and the Center for the Study of World Religions in establishing The Constellation Project where the sciences and spirituality are conjoined. She has been a Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College where she served as the Provostial Scholar from 2011 to 2017. She divides her time between Castle Valley, Utah, and Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her husband Brooke is a writer of creative nonfiction and teaches classes at Colby College.
Writing career
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).
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. and the Mountain & Plains Booksellers' Reading the West Book Award for creative nonfiction 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. On 18 September 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."
Williams' writing on ecological and social issues has appeared in The New Yorker; The New York Times; Orion magazine; and The Progressive. 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, Edward Riddell, and Fazal Sheikh.
Williams was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2019.
Activism
Williams wrote and spoke about the impact of the BP oil spill.
On 13 June 2014, Williams posted an open letter to the leadership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints expressing "solidarity with Kate Kelly and her plea to grant women equal standing in the rights, responsibilities and privileges of the [LDS Church], including the right to hold the Priesthood."
On February 18, 2016, as part of the Keep It in the Ground movement, Williams attended a federal auction of oil and gas leases and purchased several parcels totaling 1,751 acres in Grand County, Utah through a company she formed called Tempest Exploration in order to keep them from energy development.
Affiliations
Governing Council of The Wilderness Society (1989–1993)
President's Council for Sustainable Development, western team member (1994–1995)
National Parks and Conservation Association, advisory board member
Round River Conservation Studies, board member
The Nature Conservancy — Utah Chapter
Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (1985–present)
Thoreau Society, honorary advisor
American Academy of Arts and Letters (2019–present)
Honors and awards
1993 National Wildlife Federation's Conservation Award for Special Achievement
1995 Utah Governor's Award in the Humanities
1996 Inducted into the Rachel Carson Honor Roll
1997 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow
2004 One of the "Utne Reader's" "Utne 100 Visionaries"
1997 Association for Mormon Letters Lifetime Achievement Award
1999 Honorary Degree, College of the Atlantic, Bar Harbor, Maine
2000 Honorary Degree, Chatham College, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
2002 Honorary Doctor of Humanities, Utah State University, Logan, Utah
2003 Honorary Doctor of Humanities, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah
2004 Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters, Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College
2005 Wallace Stegner Award for the Center for the American West, 2005
2006 Distinguished Achievement Award from the Western American Literature Association
2006 Robert Marshall Award from The Wilderness Society
2008 Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters, Lesley University, Cambridge, Massachusetts
2008 John Wesley Powell Award, The Grand Canyon Trust
2008 Spirit of the Arctic Award, Alaska Wilderness League
2010 Honorary Doctor of Humanities, Wooster College, Wooster, Ohio
2011 International Peace Award, Community of Christ Church, 2011
2013 Robin W. Winks Award for Enhancing Public Understanding of National Parks, National Parks Conservation Association
2014 Sierra Club John Muir Award
2019 Robert Kirsch Award
Lannan Literary Fellowship in Creative Nonfiction
Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Community Literary Grant
Hemingway Foundation Literary Grant
Book awards
New York Academy of Sciences, Children's Science Book Award, 1984, The Secret Language of Snow
Southwest Book Award, 1985, Pieces of White Shell
Association for Mormon Letters, Personal Essay Award, 1991, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place
Evans Biography Award, Mountain West Center for Regional Studies, Utah State University, 1991, Refuge
Mountain & Plains Booksellers, Creative Nonfiction Award, 1992, Refuge
Association for Mormon Letters, Personal Essay Award, 1995 Desert Quartet
Utah Book Award, Nonfiction, 2000, Leap
Mountain & Plains Booksellers, Children’s Picture Book Award, 2009, The Illuminated Desert
Works
Books
The Secret Language of Snow (for children; co-authored with Ted Major, illustrations by Jennifer Dewey), Sierra Club/Pantheon Books, 1984, .
Pieces of White Shell: A Journey to Navajoland (illustrations by Clifford Brycelea), Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1984, .
Coyote's Canyon (photographs by John Telford), Peregrine Smith, Layton, Utah, 1989, .
Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place, Pantheon Books, New York, 1991, .
Leap, Pantheon Books, New York, 2000, .
Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert, Pantheon Books, New York, 2001, .
Finding Beauty In A Broken World, Pantheon Books, New York, 2008, .
When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice, Sarah Crichton Books, New York, 2012, .
The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America's National Parks, FSG, New York, 2015. Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2016,
Erosion, Picador Paper, 2020,
The Moon Is Behind Us (photographs by Fazal Sheikh), Steidl, Goettingen, 2021,
Poetry collections
Between Cattails (for children), Little, Brown, Boston, 1985, .
Earthly Messengers (with illustrations by Hal Douglas Himes), Western Slope Press, Provo, Utah, 1989.
The Illuminated Desert (for children; with art by Chloe Hedden, calligraphy by Chris Montague), Canyonlands Natural History Association, 2008, .
Essay collections
An Unspoken Hunger: Stories from the Field, Pantheon Books, New York, 1994, .
Desert Quartet: An Erotic Landscape, (with art by Mary Frank), Pantheon Books, New York, 1995, .
Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert, Pantheon Books, New York, 2001, .
The Open Space of Democracy, Orion Society Books, Great Barrington, Mass, 2004. Reissued by Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2010, .
Erosion, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2019, .
As editor
Great and Peculiar Beauty: A Utah Centennial Reader (edited with Thomas J. Lyon), Peregrine Smith, Layton, Utah 1995, .
Testimony: Writers in Defense of the Wilderness (compiled with Stephen Trimble), Milkweed Editions, Minneapolis, 1996, .
New Genesis: A Mormon Reader on Land and Community (edited with William B. Smart and Gibbs M. Smith), Peregrine Smith, Layton, Utah, 1998, .
References
Sources
Clark, Monette Tangren (Literary Assistant to Terry Tempest Williams) Moab Poets & Writers
Further reading
Chandler, Katharine R. and Melissa A. Goldthwaite. (2003) Surveying the Literary Landscapes of Terry Tempest Williams: New Critical Essays. .
Austin, Michael (editor). (2006) A Voice in the Wilderness: Conversations with Terry Tempest Williams. Utah State University Press, .
Whitt, Jan. (1 April 2016) The Redemption of Narrative: Terry Tempest Williams and Her Vision of the West. Mercer University Press, .
External links
Coyote Clan — Terry Tempest Williams' Home Page
Items by Terry Tempest Williams published in High Country News
Western American Literature Journal: Terry Tempest Williams
Terry Tempest Williams Papers. Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
1955 births
Living people
American conservationists
American health activists
American memoirists
American non-fiction environmental writers
American women essayists
American women poets
Ecotheology
Women conservationists
American women memoirists
Sierra Club awardees
American Latter Day Saints
Mormon memoirists
Mormon studies scholars
Writers from Salt Lake City
University of Utah alumni
University of Utah faculty
20th-century American essayists
21st-century American essayists
20th-century American poets
21st-century American poets
20th-century American women writers
21st-century American women writers
American nature writers
American male non-fiction writers
People from Corona, California
People from Moose, Wyoming
American women academics
Members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters