Literary Legacy

Author Terry Tempest Williams to Receive Legacy Award

Terry Tempest Williams is a widely published author and naturalist and a fierce advocate for ecological consciousness and social change. She has been called “a citizen writer” for eloquently speaking up for an ethical stance toward life and has received numerous awards and fellowships in recognition of both her prose and her activism.

Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Orion Magazine, The Progressive and numerous other publications and anthologies worldwide. She is the author of multiple books, including “Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place,” and, most recently, “When Women Were Birds.” She has testified before Congress on environmental issues, camped in the remote regions of Utah and Alaska wildernesses and worked as “a barefoot artist” in Rwanda. She is currently the Annie Clark Tanner Scholar in Environmental Humanities at the University of Utah.

By Rick Bass

Author, activist and natural historian Terry Tempest Williams—above all else, a Utah native—needs no literary identification, no list of awards. As much as I admire her ability with a pen, it is her work with her heart that impresses me so much more, instructs and inspires and emboldens all of us. With that pen and that heart, her work for wildlife, all wildlife, is unparalleled. That she includes humans among the roster of species she loves is endearing and courageous.

Regarding the terminal solitude of extinction, and the policy that seeks to serve as antidote to that final and irreversible loneliness, the Endangered Species Act—and I would certainly consider the curious experiment of ourselves a candidate for that listing, despite the great enumeration of us—she has written:

“The great consequence of the Endangered Species Act, over time, is that it ensures that we, as a species, will not be alone. We will remain part of a living, breathing, thriving community of vibrant beings with feathers, fins, and fur; roots, petals, and spines; trunks, branches, and leaves. It promises that creatures that walk with four legs or scurry on six or crawl with eight will move alongside Homo sapiens—our humanity, walking side by side, with our humility. Wild beauty sustains us. A wolverine becomes more than a thought, it is an heir to wonder. What the plants and animals are asking of us is respect and restraint. What the Endangered Species Act designed forty years ago promises them is that we will try.”

Terry has done so much for wild nature: for wild animals and, at the foundation of all of it, the wild country they need to prosper, and which shaped them into the things we love, as it has shaped us too.

What makes Terry so powerful? Her alternating elegance and ferocity. She will say anything, and does, frequently. Sometimes I think she doesn’t belong here among us, other times I think it is we who do not belong around her. As with many of these sorts of equations, perhaps both conditions are true, and she navigates the spaces within and between the two sides, in her creative, passionate way, according to each day’s variables: and no one, not even she, knows what those variables might be, only that they are limned in instinct, empathy, passion—that word again—and compassion.

She makes me believe we can win, no matter what the cause is, no matter what the odds. She defines for all of us the word warrior.

Rick Bass is an award-winning author of books, stories, articles and essays. He has collaborated with fellow nature writer and environmental activist Terry Tempest Williams to share their passionate place-based approach to prose with students at the University of Utah and, most recently, at Rwanda’s only remaining national university.