Rebecca Solnit
| Rebecca Solnit | |
|---|---|
| Born | Rebecca Solnit June 11, 1961 |
| Occupation | Author |
| Nationality | American |
Rebecca Solnit (born June 11, 1961) is a writer who lives in San Francisco. She has written on a variety of subjects including the environment, politics, place, and art.[1]
Solnit grew up in Novato, California. She skipped high school altogether, enrolling in an alternative junior high in the public school system that took her through tenth grade, when she passed the GED exam. Thereafter she enrolled in junior college. When she was 17 she went to study in Paris. She ultimately returned to California and finished her college education at San Francisco State University when she was 20.[2] She then received a Masters in Journalism from the University of California, Berkeley[3] in 1984 and has been an independent writer since 1988.[4] She credits her education in journalism and art criticism with strengthening her critical thinking skills and training her to quickly develop expertise in the great variety of subjects her books have covered.
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.[5]
Solnit has received many awards for her writing: a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan literary fellowship, two NEA Fellowships for Literature, and a 2004 Wired Rave Award[6] for writing on the effects of technology on the arts and humanities. In 2010, Utne Reader magazine named Solnit as one of the "25 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World."[7] Solnit credits Eduardo Galeano, Pablo Neruda, Ariel Dorfman, Elena Poniatowska, Gabriel García Márquez, and Virginia Woolf as writers who have influenced her work.[5]
Her writing has appeared in numerous publications in print and online, including the website Tomdispatch.com.[8]
Solnit is the author of thirteen books as well as essays in numerous museum catalogs and anthologies. Her 2009 book A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster began as an essay entitled "The Uses of Disaster: Notes on Bad Weather and Good Government" published by Harper’s Magazine the day that Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf coast. It was partially inspired by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, which Solnit described as "a remarkable occasion...a moment when everyday life ground to a halt and people looked around and hunkered down." In a conversation with filmmaker Astra Taylor for BOMB Magazine, Solnit summarized the radical theme of A Paradise Built in Hell: "What happens in disasters demonstrates everything an anarchist ever wanted to believe about the triumph of civil society and the failure of institutional authority."[5]
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Further reading [edit]
- Move Over, Joan Didion; Make room for Rebecca Solnit, California's newest cultural historian, by Heidi Benson
Selected works [edit]
- Secret Exhibition: Six California Artists of the Cold War Era (City Lights Books, 1990)
- Savage Dreams: A Journey Into the Landscape Wars of the American West (Sierra Club Books, 1994)
- A Book of Migrations: Some Passages in Ireland (Verso, 1997)
- Wanderlust: A History of Walking (Viking, 2000)
- Hollow City: The Siege of San Francisco and the Crisis of American Urbanism (Verso, 2000), co-authored and photographed by Susan Schwartzenberg
- As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender, and Art (University of Georgia Press, 2001)
- River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (Viking, 2003), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism and of the Mark Lynton History Prize.[9]
- Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities (Nation Books, 2004)
- A Field Guide to Getting Lost (Penguin, 2005)
- Yosemite in Time: Ice Ages, Tree Clocks, Ghost Rivers (Trinity University Press, 2005), with Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe
- After the Ruins, 1906 and 2006: Rephotographing the San Francisco Earthquake and Fire (University of California Press, 2006) co-authored by Philip L. Fradkin, Mark Klett, and Michael Lundgren
- Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics (University of California Press, 2007)
- "News from Nowhere: Iceland's polite dystopia". Harper's Magazine. October 2008.
- A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster (Viking, 2009)
- The Battle of the Story of the Battle of Seattle (AK Press, 2009) co-authored by David Solnit
- A California Bestiary (Heyday Books, 2010), with illustrations by Mona Caron
- Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas (University of California Press, 2010)
- The Faraway Nearby (Viking Adult, 2013)
References [edit]
- ^ Peter Terzian (July / August 2007). "Room to Roam". Columbia Journalism Review. Retrieved 2007-08-17.
- ^ http://www.entrepreneur.com/tradejournals/article/166989555.html
- ^ http://ls.berkeley.edu/?q=alumni/meet-our-alumni
- ^ http://www.literaturfestival.com/bios1_3_6_776.html
- ^ a b c "Rebecca Solnit". BOMB Magazine. Fall 2009. Retrieved 26 July 2011.
- ^ "The Wired Rave Award". Wired Magazine. April 2004. Retrieved 2009-10-08.
- ^ "Rebecca Solnit: The Silver Cloud". Retrieved 2010-10-19.
- ^ "Rebecca Solnit, Authors, TomDispatch". TomDispatch. 2011. Retrieved 2011-05-28.
- ^ Penguin Group
External links [edit]
- Rebecca Solnit official website
- Works by or about Rebecca Solnit in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
- Rebecca Solnit author page at Penguin Books
- Rebecca Solnit at The Nation magazine
- Rebecca Solnit author page at TomDispatch.com
- Rebecca Solnit in the London Review of Books
- Rebecca Solnit in Harper's Magazine
- New York Public Library conversation with Peter Coyote
- 2009 BOMB Magazine interview of Rebecca Solnit by Astra Taylor
- Interview With Rebecca Solnit by Padma Viswanathan in The Rumpus, August 7, 2009
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