New Releases by Terry Tempest Williams

In 1973, the United States Congress came together with bipartisan support to create and pass a bold and visionary act--one of protection, preservation, and promise. For the past fifty years, this promise, the Endangered Species Act, has ensured that the most threatened and vulnerable species and their habitats are protected. From the stellar sea lion to the ivory-billed woodpecker, from the steelhead trout to the red wolf--this landmark act has worked to preserve the wild beauty that surrounds and sustains us. In A Wild Promise, acclaimed artist Allen Crawford beautifully illustrates over 80 animals that embody the spirit, legacy, and commitment of the Endangered Species Act. In his trademark inventive style, Crawford''s full-color illustrations and illuminated text create a vibrant tapestry of our nation''s habitats--oceans, mountains, deserts, wetlands, prairies, forests--and the varied species that call these places home. With a powerful and moving introduction by award-winning writer and conservationist, Terry Tempest Williams, A Wild Promise brings critical urgency and inspiration, lending voice and spirit to all Endangered Species. A one-of-a-kind work that''s visually delightful and inspiring throughout, A Wild Promise is a celebration of conservation, commitment, and compassion--a clarion call to continue to embrace, engage, and act in ways that preserve and protect our living world.

Across generations and geological epochs, a grandfather invested in the care of our planet writes to his grandsons. Intimate and informed, The Planet You Inherit addresses the biggest questions for the next generation, of climate justice, earth ethics, global citizenship, and legacy.

The best political essays from Orion Magazine

Timely and unsettling essays from an important and beloved writer and conservationist. “These are essays about the courage to face what is most brutal and monstrous by finding what is most beautiful and merciful.” —Rebecca Solnit Best of Fall 2019 at Newsweek, The Chicago Tribune, Kirkus Reviews, and Literary Hub A Top Ten Book of October at The Washington Post One of “5 Boss Lady Books of Nonfiction” at BookRiot Best Spiritual Books of 2019, Spirituality & Practice Terry Tempest Williams’s fierce, spirited, and magnificent essays are a howl in the desert. She sizes up the continuing assaults on America’s public lands and the erosion of our commitment to the open space of democracy. She asks: “How do we find the strength to not look away from all that is breaking our hearts?” We know the elements of erosion: wind, water, and time. They have shaped the spectacular physical landscape of our nation. Here, Williams bravely and brilliantly explores the many forms of erosion we face: of democracy, science, compassion, and trust. She examines the dire cultural and environmental implications of the gutting of Bear Ears National Monument—sacred lands to Native Peoples of the American Southwest; of the undermining of the Endangered Species Act; of the relentless press by the fossil fuel industry that has led to a panorama in which “oil rigs light up the horizon.” And she testifies that the climate crisis is not an abstraction, offering as evidence the drought outside her door and, at times, within herself. These essays are Williams’s call to action, blazing a way forward through difficult and dispiriting times. We will find new territory—emotional, geographical, communal. The erosion of desert lands exposes the truth of change. What has been weathered, worn, and whittled away is as powerful as what remains. Our undoing is also our becoming. Erosion is a book for this moment, political and spiritual at once, written by one of our greatest naturalists, essayists, and defenders of the environment. She reminds us that beauty is its own form of resistance, and that water can crack stone. “If Wiliams’s haunting, powerful and brave book can be summed up in one line of advice it would be this: try to stare down the grief of everyday life, speak out and find solace in the boundless beauty of nature.” —Diane Ackerman, The New York Times Book Review “Erosion is a spiritual and profound anthology that could not be more appropriate for our time.” —Julia Rose Pignataro, Newsweek

A collection of poetry, prose, photographs, and art created by Harvard University students and published by the Harvard Office for Sustainability in 2018

America’s national parks are breathing spaces in a world in which such spaces are steadily disappearing, which is why more than 300 million people visit the parks each year. Now Terry Tempest Williams, the author of the environmental classic Refuge and the beloved memoir When Women Were Birds, returns with The Hour of Land, a literary celebration of our national parks, an exploration of what they mean to us and what we mean to them. From the Grand Tetons in Wyoming to Acadia in Maine to Big Bend in Texas and more, Williams creates a series of lyrical portraits that illuminate the unique grandeur of each place while delving into what it means to shape a landscape with its own evolutionary history into something of our own making. Part memoir, part natural history, and part social critique, The Hour of Land is a meditation and a manifesto on why wild lands matter to the soul of America.

Black and white landscape photos of Jackson Hole by Edward Riddell, Wyoming with essay by Terry Tempest Williams.

This catalog was published in conjunction with the exhibition "Work To Do: Trent Alvey, Pam Bowman, Jann Haworth, Amy Jorgensen." Exploring narratives such as domesticity, environment, cinema, motherhood, ritual, and body. The artist in Work To Do investigate questions and issues linked to the notions of "women''s work." Women around the world negage in this complex dialogue on a daily basis, and the artwork in the exhibition at the BYU Museum of Art examines wide-ranging but personal questions on how we are affected by the physical, social, and historical landscapes around us, and what it means to be a woman in the Beehive state.

The acclaimed author of Refuge here weaves together a resonant and often rhapsodic manifesto on behalf of the landscapes she loves, combining the power of her observations in the field with her personal experience—as a woman, a Mormon, and a Westerner. Through the grace of her stories we come to see how a lack of intimacy with the natural world has initiated a lack of intimacy with each other. Williams shadows lions on the Serengeti and spots night herons in the Bronx. She pays homage to the rogue spirits of Edward Abbey and Georgia O’Keeffe, contemplates the unfathomable wildness of bears, and directs us to a politics of place. The result is an utterly persuasive book—one that has the power to change the way we live upon the earth.

With Leap, Terry Tempest Williams, award-winning author of Refuge, offers a sustained meditation on passion, faith, and creativity-based upon her transcendental encounter with Hieronymus Bosch''s medieval masterpiece The Garden of Delights. Williams examines this vibrant landscape with unprecedented acuity, recognizing parallels between the artist''s prophetic vision and her own personal experiences as a Mormon and a naturalist. Searing in its spiritual, intellectual, and emotional courage, Williams''s divine journey enables her to realize the full extent of her faith and through her exquisite imagination opens our eyes to the splendor of the world.

"The Williamses anchor Jefferies'' profound inquiry to our churning world and illuminate their own passionate quests for truth and understanding." —BOOKLIST, starred review While browsing a Stonington, Maine, bookstore, Brooke Williams and Terry Tempest Williams discovered a rare copy of an exquisite autobiography by nineteenth–century British nature writer Richard Jefferies, who develops his understanding of a "soul-life" while wandering the wild countryside of Wiltshire, England. Brooke and Terry, like John Fowles, Henry Miller, and Rachel Carson before, were inspired by the prescient words of this visionary writer, who describes ineffable feelings of being at one with nature. In an introduction and essays set alongside Jefferies'' writing, the Williams share their personal pilgrimage to Wiltshire to understand this man of "cosmic consciousness" and how their exploration of Jefferies deepened their own relationship while illuminating dilemmas of modernity, the intrinsic need for wildness, and what it means to be human in the twenty–first century. JOHN RICHARD JEFFERIES (6 November 1848 – 14 August 1887) was a British novelist and essayist who helped pioneer the field of modern nature writing. Jefferies described the English countryside with an intimate vividness and expansive passion that inspired both his contemporaries and later writers. TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS is the author of fourteen books including Erosion: Essays of Undoing, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place, and When Women Were Birds. Recipient of John Simon Guggenheim and Lannan Literary Fellowships in creative nonfiction, she is the Provostial Scholar at Dartmouth College. Her work has been anthologized and translated world–wide. BROOKE WILLIAMS has spent thirty years advocating for wildness, most recently with the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance and as the Executive Director of the Murie Center in Moose, Wyoming. He holds an MBA in Sustainable Business from the Bainbridge Graduate Institute and a Biology degree from the University of Utah. He has written four books including Halflives: Reconciling Work and Wildness, and dozens of articles. He is involved in The Great West Institute, a think tank exploring expansion and innovation in the conservation movement and is currently working on a book about ground–truthing. Brooke and Terry have been married since 1975. They live with their dogs in Jackson, Wyoming, and Castle Valley, Utah.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER A Kansas City Star Best Book of the Year "Brilliant, meditative, and full of surprises, wisdom, and wonder."—Ann Lamott, author of Imperfect Birds "I am leaving you all my journals, but you must promise me you won''t look at them until after I''m gone." This is what Terry Tempest Williams''s mother, the matriarch of a large Mormon clan in northern Utah, told her a week before she died. It was a shock to Williams to discover that her mother had kept journals. But not as much of a shock as it was to discover that the three shelves of journals were all blank. In fifty-four short chapters, Williams recounts memories of her mother, ponders her own faith, and contemplates the notion of absence and presence art and in our world. When Women Were Birds is a carefully crafted kaleidoscope that keeps turning around the question: What does it mean to have a voice?

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 basis of this book. But the whole is much more than the sum of its parts. These paintings represent an ongoing narrative: “island as escape and entrapment, island as longing and memory, island as sanctuary, island as self in a sea of turmoil.” The paintings are accompanied by essays by Terry Tempest Williams, exploring Curry’s spirit of place, and Carl Little, establishing Curry’s art within the field of landscape painting.

Terry Tempest Williams presents a sharp-edged perspective on the ethics and politics of place, spiritual democracy, and the responsibilities of citizen engagement. By turns elegiac, inspiring, and passionate, The Open Space of Democracy offers a fresh perspective on the critical questions of our time.

"Shards of glass can cut and wound or magnify a vision," Terry Tempest Williams tells us. "Mosaic celebrates brokenness and the beauty of being brought together." Ranging from Ravenna, Italy, where she learns the ancient art of mosaic, to the American Southwest, where she observes prairie dogs on the brink of extinction, to a small village in Rwanda where she joins genocide survivors to build a memorial from the rubble of war, Williams searches for meaning and community in an era of physical and spiritual fragmentation. In her compassionate meditation on how nature and humans both collide and connect, Williams affirms a reverence for all life, and constructs a narrative of hopeful acts, taking that which is broken and creating something whole.

Debra Bloomfield''s hypnotic photographs provide a visual map of the powerful interplay between sea and sky. Over theyears, on a single lonesome stretch of beach, Bloomfield has captured an undeniably intimate portrait of the ocean at rest. Almost impressionistic in their tone, this collection of 60 photographs chronicling seascapes smudging into a series of hazy horizons creates a striking contrast with what we''ve come to expect of ocean photography. Still is a captivating and entrancing vision by a unique voice in contemporary photography.