Tuesday, February 28, 2012
7:00 p.m.
Mitchell Hall, Newark, DE
Free and open to the public
Download a PDF flyer for the event 
here
Join DENIN for an intimate evening with renowned environmental writer Terry Tempest Williams as she is interviewed on stage by the University of Delaware's own McKay Jenkins, Cornelius Tilghman Professor of English. Audience members will be invited to join the conversation by submitting questions electronically ahead of time or during the question and answer session following the interview. To submit a question for Terry Tempest Williams in advance, please post your question on DENIN's Facebook or Twitter accounts or via email. A book-signing opportunity will also follow the lecture.
About Terry Tempest Williams
Terry Tempest Williams has been called "a citizen writer," a writer who speaks and speaks out eloquently on behalf of an ethical stance toward life. A naturalist and fierce advocate for freedom of speech, she has consistently shown us how environmental issues are social issues that ultimately become matters of justice. Williams, like her writing, cannot be categorized. She has testified before Congress on women’s health issues, been a guest at the White House, has camped in the remote regions of Utah and Alaska wildernesses and worked as "a barefoot artist" in Rwanda.
Known for her impassioned and lyrical prose, Terry Tempest Williams is the author of the environmental literature classic, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place; An Unspoken Hunger: Stories from the Field; Desert Quartet; Leap; Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert; and The Open Space of Democracy. Her book, Finding Beauty in a Broken World, was published in October 2008 by Pantheon Books. Her next book, When Women Were Birds, will be published in Spring 2012 by Farrar Straus & Giroux. She is also a columnist for the magazine The Progressive.
In 2006, Williams received the Robert Marshall Award from The Wilderness Society, their highest honor given to an American citizen. She also received the Distinguished Achievement Award from the Western American Literature Association and the Wallace Stegner Award given by The Center for the American West. She is the recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in creative nonfiction.
Terry Tempest Williams is currently the Annie Clark Tanner Scholar in Environmental Humanities at the University of Utah. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Orion Magazine, and numerous anthologies worldwide as a crucial voice for ecological consciousness and social change. She and her husband, Brooke Williams, divide their time between Castle Valley, Utah and Jackson Hole, Wyoming.
About McKay Jenkins
McKay Jenkins has been writing about people and the natural world for 25 years. His most recent work is What’s Gotten Into Us: Staying Healthy in a Toxic World (Random House, 2011), which chronicles his investigation into the myriad synthetic chemicals we encounter in our daily lives and the growing body of evidence about the harm these chemicals do to our bodies and the environment. He is also the author of Bloody Falls of the Coppermine: Madness and Murder in the Arctic Barren Lands; The Last Ridge: The Epic Story of the U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division and the Assault on Hitler’s Europe; and The White Death: Tragedy and Heroism in an Avalanche Zone. Jenkins is also the editor of The Peter Matthiessen Reader, an anthology of the American nature writer’s finest and most enduring nonfiction work.
Jenkins holds degrees from Amherst, Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, and Princeton, where he received a PhD in English. A former staff writer for the Atlanta Constitution, he has also written for Outside, Orion, The New Republic, and many other publications. Jenkins is currently the director of the journalism program and co-director of the environmental humanities program at the University of Delaware, where he has won the Excellence in Teaching Award. He lives in Baltimore with his family.
Co-sponsors of this DENIN Dialogue Lecture include the College of Arts & Sciences, the CAS Environmental Humanities Initiative, the Department of English, and the UD Honors Program.
This program is partially funded by a grant from the Delaware Humanities Forum, a state program of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Thursday, January 12, 2012
Editor's note: This story has been updated to reflect a new start time, 7:30 p.m., and a new place, Mitchell Hall.