Rebecca Solnit
2008 Fellow
Rebecca Solnit is a writer and activist living in San Francisco. She has written on a variety of subjects including the environment, politics, place, and art. Solnit has worked on environmental and human rights campaigns since the 1980s, notably with the Western Shoshone Defense Project in the early 1990s, as described in her book Savage Dreams,and with antiwar activists throughout the Bush era.Solnit has also followed and participated in various revolutions worldwide, including Tiananmen Square, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, and the Velvet Revolution.Solnit is the author of thirteen books as well as essays in numerous museum catalogues and anthologies. Her books include Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas, a book of 22 maps and nearly 30 collaborators; A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster; Storming the Gates of Paradise; A Field Guide to Getting Lost; Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities; Wanderlust: A History of Walking; As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender and Art; and River of Shadows, Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, for which she received a Guggenheim fellowship, the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and the Lannan Literary Award.She has worked with climate change, Native American land rights, antinuclear, human rights, antiwar and other issues as an activist and journalist.