Central College received a special grant from Humanities Iowa, the state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities, to help support this event.
Williams is best known for her impassioned and lyrical prose. Her best-known work, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place, is an environmental literature classic. Her other works include An Unspoken Hunger: Stories from the Field, Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert, The Open Space of Democracy and her most recent, Finding Beauty in a Broken World.
A columnist for The Progressive, her writing has also appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Orion Magazine and numerous anthologies worldwide as a voice for ecological consciousness and social change. Hailed as a “citizen writer,” she has testified before Congress on women’s health issues, been a guest in the White House, camped in remote regions of Utah and Alaska and worked as a barefoot artist in Rwanda.
The Geisler Library Writers Reading series was established in 1987 to promote an appreciation of the books and their authors and features locally, nationally and internationally known writers reading and discussing their works. This is the seventh year that Humanities Iowa has chosen to support this program.