Testimony

Author's Bio:

Terry Tempest Williams is a Utah native and naturalist-in-residence at the Utah Museum of Natural History. Among many works, she is the author of Pieces of White Shell: A Journey to Navajoland. She has received a Lannan Literary Fellowship in creative nonfiction and currently serves on the board of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance. She was recently inducted into the Rachel Carson Institute’s Honor Roll.

Stephen Trimble, writer and photographer, lives in Salt Lake City. He worked as a park ranger at Arches and Capitol Reef National Parks in the 1970s and, later, as director of the Museum of Northern Arizona Press. His books include Blessed By Light:Visions of the Colorado Plateau, The People: Indians of the American Southwest, and The Geography of Childhood:Why Children Need Wild Places. He won a Frank Waters Southwest Writing Award for a short story set in the southern Utah wilderness.

Quotes:

“Will surely become a landmark document for the U.S. environmental movement.... From this book we re-learn why humans need wilderness, and why we Americans, especially, need the American wildernesses that are part of our national identity.” —Amicus Journal

“Good writing can make a place come alive. Testimony gives voice to the magnificence and quiet majesty of southern Utah's wilderness lands. I found its essays and poems useful in setting a tone for what is at stake in the battle over Utah wilderness, particularly for those who had never experienced the lands of the Basin and Range or Colorado Plateau. If writing itself can be an act of public service, then this collection is it.” —Senator Bill Bradley

“Wilderness advocacy has produced some of America's finest literature of place. And in campaigns for preservation, the pen has proven mightier than the ax, chainsaw, and bulldozer.... The creators of Testimony hark back to earlier advocacy writing. But it all feels fresh, as if twenty voices had stuck an undiscovered and irristibly powerful chord.... It will, inevitably, move thousands of readers and become part of the canon of the best American writing about landscape, outer and inner.” —Pittsburgh Post Gazette

“It's a great read; moving through the pieces in Testimony feels somethign like splashing your face with cold water, and it's firm grounding in a place Wallace Stegner referred to as “the geography of hope.'” —Eugene Weekly

“An eloquent chapbook of essays, poems, and observations.... Besides persuasive prose, the book contains a map of Utah redrock wilderness plus a list and map of U.S. wilderness areas.” —Pacific Discovery