Rebecca Solnit, Essayist, Critic, Activist
Thursday, April 8, 2010, 11:10 a.m.
"Swimming Upstream in History: Hope, Disaster, Utopia"
Rebecca Solnit is an activist, historian and writer whose work has been compared to that of Susan Sontag. Her work focuses on cultural geographies, the environment, speed and slowness, and the inner life of public events.
She is the author of a dozen books, including her most recent, “A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster.” Released in August, 2009, the book explores the phenomena of people’s changed states of mind and social possibilities — altruistic, resourceful, and brave - in response to natural and manmade disasters.
Among her previous books are 2007's “Storming the Gates of Paradise,” an anthology of essays from the past 10 years, in which she creates a guidebook to the American social and ecological landscape after the millennium; “A Field Guide to Getting Lost;” “Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities;” “Wanderlust: A History of Walking;” and “River of Shadows, Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West,” for which she received a Guggenheim Foundation Grant, the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and the Lannan Literary Award.
A native Californian who currently lives in San Francisco, Solnit is a contributing editor to Harper's, writes a column for Orion magazine, and contributes frequently to the environmental magazine Sierra and the Web site tomdispatch.com.
