An Evening with Terry Tempest Williams

Photo by Marion Ettlinger

Elk River Books is honored to celebrate its second birthday with a lecture by author and naturalist Terry Tempest Williams at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, June 18, in the ballroom of the Shane Lalani Center for the Arts, 415 E. Lewis St. in Livingston.

A fierce advocate for social justice and the natural world, Tempest is known for her lyrical and impassioned prose. Her breakthrough book, Refuge, documented her mother’s death from breast cancer juxtaposed against the flooding of the Bear River bird refuge, in the context of fallout from nuclear testing in her native Utah. Tempest takes her spirituality, grounded in Mormonism, to universal levels, in a search for transcendence in the ashes of genocide and slaughter (Finding Beauty in a Broken World), strength from imagination (The Open Space of Democracy), passion in a scorched landscape (Red), and the convergence of flesh and soul (Leap). In her latest book, When Women Were Birds, Williams tackles the mystery of her late mother’s journals, shelf after shelf of blank pages she turns into a meditation on voice.

Williams is both a Guggenheim and Lannan fellow, recipient of the Wallace Stegner Award, the Wilderness Society’s prestigious Robert Marshall Award, and Distinguished Achievement Award from the Western American Literature Association. She was also recipient of the Community of Christ International Peace Award “in recognition of significant peacemaking vision, advocacy and action,” as well as the David R. Brower Conservation Award for activism.

She will be introduced by her long-time friend, author Doug Peacock, who calls Williams “the most important moral voice of her generation.”

Tickets for the event are $50, and include a book signing and reception with the author following her lecture. A portion of the proceeds will go to benefit Elk River Arts & Lectures, a new nonprofit dedicated to bringing writers and artists to Livingston.

For more information, call 224-5802.