Publisher Description
In the spring of 1983 Terry Tempest Williams learned that her mother was dying of cancer. That same season, The Great Salt Lake began to rise to record heights, threatening the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge and the herons, owls, and snowy egrets that Williams, a poet and naturalist, had come to gauge her life by. One event was nature at its most random, the other a by-product of rogue technology: Terry's mother, and Terry herself, had been exposed to the fallout of atomic bomb tests in the 1950s. As it interweaves these narratives of dying and accommodation, Refuge transforms tragedy into a document of renewal and spiritual grace, resulting in a work that has become a classic.
Download and start listening now!
About Terry Tempest Williams
Terry Tempest Williams is and editor and award-winning author of more than a dozen books, poetry collections, and essay collections. She has received many awards, including the 2018 Robert Kirsch Award, the Robert Marshall Award from the Wilderness Society, the Distinguished Achievement Award from the Western American Literature Association, the Wallace Stegner Award given by Center of the American West, the Lannan Literary Award, and the Sierra Club John Muir Award. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she is the writer-in-residence at the Harvard Divinity School.