Terry Tempest Williams

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.

Williams speaks out for some of the most disavowed individuals on the planet: prairie dogs, who are threatened with extinction, and Rwandan refugees. She deftly draws meaning out of moments of devastation with inspiring stories of rodents who pray at sunrise and sunset and a mother who, after losing her child to the ravages of war, creates a mosaic sunflower out of the rubble.

Terry takes us on a whirlwind tour of what it means to give voice to our own authenticity. It requires deep listening and fertile silences. She encourages us to speak "Mother Tongue" - speaking from the belly rather than the mind. She laments that in Western culture "the language of economics has power, the language of the law has power, the language of science has power. But an intelligence of the heart, an emotional intelligence, or a poetic sensibility,...

Here we stare down our present situation without flinching but with radical hope as Williams reminds us that love and beauty are felt in chaos and heartbreak. Healing is going beyond anger; It's a process of eroding and evolving at once. We must let go of our certainty to come back into a place of communion and communication with each other and with the earth.

In this potent collage of stories, essays, and testimony, Williams makes a stirring case for the preservation of America’s Redrock Wilderness in the canyon country of southern Utah.
As passionate as she is persuasive, Williams, the beloved author of Refuge,  is one of the country’s most eloquent and imaginative writers. The desert is her blood. Here she writes lyrically about the desert’s power...

"A personal, lyrical, and idiosyncratic ode to our national parks"-- "For years, America's national parks have provided public breathing spaces in a world in which such spaces are steadily disappearing, which is why close to 300 million people visit the parks each year. Now, to honor the centennial of the National Park Service, Terry Tempest Williams, the author of the beloved memoir When Women Were Birds, returns with The Hour of Land, a literary...

The naturalist author of Refuge and An Unspoken Hunger reflects on what it means to be human, the interconnection between the natural and human worlds, and how they combine to produce both tumult and peace, ugliness and beauty.

In fifty-four chapters that unfold like a series of yoga poses, each with its own logic and beauty, Williams (beloved author of "Refuge") creates a lyrical and caring meditation of the mystery of her mother's journals .. and what it means to have a voice beyond a selfless existence informed by children and a husband.

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.