Acclaimed Writer Terry Tempest Williams Accepts UW's First State-Endowed Professorship |
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May 22, 2007 -- Internationally-acclaimed nature and environmental writer, Terry Tempest Williams, will be the University of Wyoming's first "Eminent Writer-in-Residence" during the 2007-2008 academic year.
She has accepted Wyoming's first state-endowed professorship funded by the Excellence in Higher Education Endowment. The 2006 Wyoming State Legislature established the endowment that included $70 million to create senior faculty positions for "highly distinguished scholars and teachers."
While in residence in the UW Department of English, she will teach a creative writing Master of Fine Arts workshop and direct MFA theses. She will also host brown bag lunch "conversations" for members of the university and Laramie communities during the fall semester. In the spring, she will conduct "weather reports," innovative outreach events in four Wyoming locations, designed to inspire conversations and writing about change in Wyoming communities.
Williams found herself in the literary limelight when she published her sixth book, the 1991 memoir "Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place." In it, she described the epic rise of the Great Salt Lake that flooded her favorite bird refuge as her mother, who had lived downwind from a nuclear test site, was dying of ovarian cancer.
In 2001, Williams wrote of her lifelong love of the desert and the spiritual and political commitment needed to preserve the fragile Redrock Wilderness in southern Utah in "Red: Patience and Passion in the Desert."
Her other works include two essay collections, "An Unspoken Hunger," and "The Open Space of Democracy," about the ethics of space politics. Williams also wrote "Desert Quartet: An Erotic Landscape," "Coyote's Canyon," and "Pieces of White Shell: A Journey to Navajoland," along with two children's books. Her essays and articles, appearing in major magazines, have been widely anthologized.
An activist dedicated to preserving the environment, Williams has served on the Governing Council of the Wilderness Society, was a member of the western team for the President's Council for Sustainable Development, the advisory board of the National Parks and Conservation Association, the Nature Conservancy, and the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance. She is the editor of a collection of short stories, "Testimony: Writers Speak on Behalf of Utah Wilderness."
Among her many honors are the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, the Lannan Literary Fellowship, the 2005 Wallace Stegner Award by the Center for the American West, and the Wilderness Society's highest honor for a private citizen.
The legislation creating the Excellence in Higher Education Endowment states that the endowed positions must expand university instruction and research in disciplines related to economic and social challenges facing Wyoming. Four endowed faculty positions must, by law, be in the College of Education. The remaining endowed faculty must have established reputations in other areas of distinction as identified in the university Academic Plan, including business, arts and humanities, mathematics, cultural studies, economics and law.
Posted on Tuesday, May 22, 2007
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